AN  AMERICAN  FAMILY 


An  American  Family 


A  NOVEL  OF  TO-DAY 


By 
HENRY  KITCHELL  WEBSTER 

Author  of 

The  Real  Adventure,  The  Painted  Scene 
etc.,  etc. 


INDIANAPOLIS 

THE  BOBBS-MERRILL  COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS 


COPYRIGHT  1918 
THE  BOBBS-MERRILL  COMPANY 


This  novel  appeared  serially  in  Everybody's 
Magazine  under  the  title  The  White  Arc. 
The  new  name — AN  AMERICAN  FAMILY — is 
more  accurately  descriptive  of  the  substance 
and  spirit  of  the  story  and  for  this  reason 
the  change  was  made . 


PRESS  or 

BRAUNWORTH  &  CO. 

BOOK  MANUFACTURERS 

BROOKLYN,  N.  Y. 


AN  AMERICAN  FAMILY 


913971 


\ 


An  American  Family 


BOOK  I 

THE  HOUSE 

CHAPTER  I 

WHEN  a  clock  somewhere  in  the  big  strange  house 
struck  a  deliberate  three,  Jean  Gilbert  sat  up  in 
bed  and  craned  forward  for  a  better  look  out  of  the 
window  at  the  June  night.     No  signs  of  dawn  yet,  though 
there  might  be  if  it  weren't  for  a  thin  old  moon  high  up  in 
the  sky.    Anyhow,  there  would  surely  be  daylight  in  an  hour, 
and  she  did  not  believe  she  would  fall  asleep  sooner  than  that. 
If  she  did  not  it  would  be  fair  to  say,  wouldn't  it  (to  her 
self,  of  course.    She  did  not  mean  to  confide  the  adventure  to 
any  one  else),  that  she  had  lain  awake  all  night? 

It  was  sultry  still.  Chicago,  it  seemed,  had  gone  to  sleep 
at  last.  It  must  be  half  an  hour  anyway  since  the  last  motor 
had  gone  howling  by  in  the  Drive.  She  could  hear  quite 
plainly  the  tired  little  waves  collapsing  on  the  beach  beyond 
the  slender  strip  of  parkway. 

She  pulled  her  two  thick  braids  forward  over  her  shoul 
ders  and  dropped  back  on  the  pillow  again.  She  hoped  she 
wouldn't  go  to  sleep.  There  were  so  many  wonderful  things 
to  think  about;  memories — fresh  warm  memories,  all  less 
than  a  week  old  which  she  had  not  half  got  through  the  cata 
logue  of. 

She  had  said  the  other  day  in  answer  to  Mrs.  Corbett's 
blunt  "How  old  are  you,  child  ?"  that  she  was  not  quite  seven- 


8  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

teen.  And  three  breaths  later  she  had  added  scrupulously 
and  with  great  dignity,  "That  is,  1  am  more  than  sixteen  and 
a  half."  She  was — a  matter  of  days. 

It  had  not  been  an  easy  admission  to  make  in  the  circum 
stances,  and  indeed  Mrs.  Corbett  had  exclaimed,  "Heavens! 
You're  a  baby."  But  nothing  happened.  The  maid  went  on 
hooking  the  miraculous  bridesmaid's  dress,  and  Anne  Cor 
bett,  who  was  going  to  be  the  bride,  looking  at  her  with  half- 
shut  eyes  to  get  the  effect,  said : 

"Nonsense,  mother !  She's  Muriel's  height  to  a  hair  and  the 
gown  might  have  been  made  for  her." 

It  would  all  have  remained  wonderful  enough,  to  be  sure, 
even  if  "more  than  sixteen  and  a  half"  had  been  adjudged 
fatally  too  young  for  this  last  ineffable  honor  they  proposed 
for  her;  just  the  sober  facts,  which  were — I'll  try  to  be  brief 
with  them — these : 

Jean's  father  was  Captain  Roger  Gilbert  of  the  United 
States  Army.  He  was  poor;  had  nothing  to  live  on  but  his 
pay.  And  he  was  young — only  forty  when  Jean  had  her  six 
teenth  birthday.  His  wife  was  even  younger ;  only  thirty-seven 
— twenty-one  when  Jean  was  born — a  fact  which  proclaims 
romance  upon  its  face. 

Jean's  grandmother,  old  Mrs.  Myron  Crawford,  strong- 
willed  and  able-minded,  put  by  her  husband's  untimely  death 
in  unchecked  control  of  a  very  large  estate,  had  had  her  own 
way  in  nearly  everything ;  certainly  with  the  first  three  of  her 
children.  The  girl,  Christine,  married  an  English  aristocrat 
and  the  elder  sons  lived  up  to  this  event.  But  the  last  pair, 
Frank  and  Ethel, — they  were  twins — were  brought  up  less 
rigorously.  Frank  was  allowed  his  heart's  desire,  West  Point, 
and  it  was  thus  his  sister  Ethel  and  young  Roger  Gilbert  met. 

They  fell  in  love,  it  is  almost  true  to  say,  at  sight.  It  was  one 
of  those  tolerably  rare  cases  (fortunately  rare,  a  prudent  per 
son  might  be  tempted  to  say,  because  they  always  produce  an 
explosion  of  some  sort  and  not  infrequently,  a  tragedy)  of 
a  genuine,  unmistakable  affinity.  They  would  have  married 
eventually,  no  doubt,  even  if  the  form  of  the  widow  Craw 
ford's  opposition  had  been  subtle — Machiavellian — serpentine. 


THE    HOUSE  3 

As  it  was,  a  reckless  and  quite  indiscriminate  anger  simply 
flung  the  pair  of  children  together,  and  they  married  rather 
madly,  offhand,  and  had  a  baby  upon  a  second  lieutenant's 
salary. 

So  Jean,  as  if  no  such  institution  as  indulgent  grand- 
motherhood  existed  in  the  world,  grew  up  as  best  she  could, 
in  one  army  post  after  another.  She  went  thrice  to  the  Philip 
pines.  She  spent  a  miserable  year  in  a  Washington  boarding- 
house.  There  was  a  place  called,  temporarily,  home  in  the 
Presidio,  in  Fort  Riley,  in  Brownsville,  in  other  places — more 
than  she  could  remember. 

Her  formal  education,  of  course,  was  perfectly  ramshackle 
and  fortuitous.  What  she  had  really  been  brought  up  on  was 
her  father's  code — that  of  an  officer  and  a  gentleman.  She 
could  ride  straight  and  speak  the  truth.  She  could  obey 
orders  with  a  stiff  mouth.  And  when  she  was  afraid,  no  one 
knew  it. 

Nemesis  meanwhile  had  overtaken  old  Mrs.  Crawford.  Her 
two  oldest  sons  were  drowned  in  a  yachting  accident,  one  in 
the  attempt  to  save  the  life  of  the  other.  With  one  daughter 
married  abroad,  the  other  estranged  from  her,  and  her  one 
remaining  son  in  the  army,  she  would  be,  to  all  intents  and 
purposes,  childless.  So  the  only  thing  to  be  done  was  for 
Prank  to  resign  his  commission,  come  home,  and  take  his 
post  as  titular  head  of  the  family.  Disaster  had  shaken  her 
a  good  deal  and  softened  her  a  little,  and,  as  she  never  had 
really  established  the  habit  of  tyrannizing  over  her  youngest 
son,  she  found  it  easier  to  defer  to  his  judgment ;  especially  as 
it  was  nearly  always  good.  An  example  of  it,  to  her  notion, 
was  his  marriage  with  the  eldest  Corbett  girl,  Constance.  This 
was  distinctly  his  own  doing,  but  she  admitted  she  couldn't 
have  chosen  better  herself. 

The  bond  between  Prank  Crawford  and  his  twin  sister, 
Ethel,  had  never  been  broken,  and  his  own  marriage  strength 
ened  rather  than  weakened  it.  Constance,  who  was  five  years 
younger  than  Ethel,  had  always  known  her,  of  course;  the 
Corbetts  and  the  Crawfords  both  dated  back  to  old  West  Side 
Chicago,  To  Constance,  as  to  her  bosom  friends  Predcriea 


4  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

and  Harriet  Aldrich,  Ethel's  romantic  marriage  had  been  a 
wonderful  event. 

The  Gilberts  were  away  in  the  Philippines  when  Frank  and 
Constance  were  married,  but  when  they  came  back,  five  years 
later,  Constance  broached  to  her  husband  a  plan  which  she  had 
kept  mellowing  in  the  wood  for  a  long  time. 

"Jean's  a  dear/'  she  said,  "and  beautifully  brought  up. 
But,  Frank,  it  can't  go  on  like  that !  It  would  be  wicked  to 
let  it.  She's  just  got  to  the  age  where  things  begin  to  make 
a  difference.  And  that  isn't  going  to  be  her  life,  really.  At 
least  it  needn't  be  unless  she  wants  it  to.  She  ought  to  have 
the  right  kind  of  friends,  and  she  ought  to  go  to  a  good  school 
for  two  years  anyway." 

Frank  agreed  to  all  this,  but  didn't  at  first  see  how  it  was 
feasible. 

"I've  talked  to  Eoger  about  it;  come  as  close  as  I  dared. 
But  they  can't  afford  it  and  they  won't  take  money.  His 
face  looked  like  a  piece  of  armor-plate  when  I  hinted  at  it." 

"Well,  don't  hint,"  said  Constance.  "Come  straight  out 
with  it.  Let  me  go  and  talk  with  Ethel.  Look  here !  Let's 
get  them  to  give  her  to  us.  Roger's  sure  to  be  sent  to  the 
border  and  she'll  go  with  him.  But  even  they  can't  think 
of  taking  the  child  down  there.  We  won't  go  into  details  at 
all.  We'll  just  say  we  want  her  for  three  or  four  years  to  do 
as  we  like  with."  She  understood  very  well  the  expression 
she  saw  go  across  her  husband's  face.  "It'll  be,  I  suppose," 
she  admitted,  "sort  of  a  shock  to  Mother  Crawford  when  we 
tell  her  what  we've  done.  But,  Frank,  down  in  her  heart  that's 
what  she  wants.  She's  hoping  for  it — something  like  that. 
Only,  of  course,  she  can't  say  so." 

Frank  turned  it  over  meditatively  for  a  while.  "How  about 
you  ?"  he  asked  at  last.  "With  two  kids  of  your  own  already 
and  another  on  the  way,  haven't  you  got  your  hands  full  ?" 

But  Constance  was  clear  that  she  hadn't.  "I'm  really  self 
ish  about  it,"  she  said.  "I  want  her." 

After  a  while  Frank  finished  the  subject  with  a  nod.  "All 
right,"  he  said,  "go  to  it.  I  shan't  be  surprised  if  you  put  it 


THE    HOUSE  5 

On  Jean  the  news  fell,  astonishingly,  all  at  once  without 
even  a  premonitory  murmur.  Her  father  said  to  her  one 
evening,  just  after  retreat,  in  the  crisp  serious  manner  he 
used  for  orders : 

"Jean,  you're  to  be  made  a  young  lady  of.  You're  to  be 
packed  and  ready  to  leave  for  Chicago  a  week  from  to-day. 
You're  going  to  live  for  a  while  with  your  Uncle  Frank  Craw 
ford  and  his  wife.  They've  got  plans  for  you  that  we've  all 
agreed  are  good." 

So  far  as  getting  results  went,  he  understood  the  girl  even 
better  than  her  mother  did.  She  squared  her  shoulders  and 
brought  her  boot-heels  together  with  a  click  (she  was  in  riding 
things).  "Yes,  sir,"  she  said.  An  old  sergeant  couldn't  have 
done  it  better. 

He  stood  before  her  as  rigid  as  she  was,  but  she  saw  the 
tears  springing  to  his  eyes  before  her  own  came  to  blind  her. 
He  came  up  close  and  took  her  by  the  shoulders. 

"There  are  a  lot  of  good  reasons  we  talked  about  whe?i 
Constance  was  here,"  he  said.  "You  haven't  had  an  ortho 
dox  bringing  up,  and  I  suppose  you're  entitled  to  it.  Within 
the  next  ten  years  there's  a  good  chance  that  you'll  find  your 
self  rich ;  opportunities  open  to  you  that,  if  we  go  on  like  this, 
you  won't  understand  nor  know  what  to  do  with.  They  say 
you  ought  to  have  a  look  around  first.  That  sounds  like  good 
sense,  too. 

"But  my  reason — my  real  reason  for  letting  you  go,  I 
haven't  told  even  your  mother.  I  shan't  tell  it  to  any  one 
but  you.  Ethel's  getting  homesick  after  all  these  years.  She 
wouldn't  admit  it  to  me  under  torture,  but  I  know  it's  true. 
She'd  like  to  have  the  door  open  to  her  own  people  again. 
She'd  like  to  be  reconciled  to  her  mother  before  the  old  lady 
dies.  And  it's  through  you,  by  this  plan,  that  the  thing  can 
be  done.  I'm  willing  to  give  you  up  for  three  or  four  years 
for  that.  Do  you  see,  chicken?  Now  go  find  your  mother 
and  tell  her  you're  happy  about  it.  We're  neither  of  us  al 
lowed  to  cry  where  she  can  see." 

She  did  cry,  of  course,  when  she  was  by  herself — experi 
enced  some  pretty  desolate  hours.  The  parents  she  was  leav- 


6  AN    AMERICAN   FAMILY 

ing  comprised  an  unusually  large  part  of  all  her  world,  and 
what  there  was  besides  was  to  be  left  behind  with  them.  An 
emigrant  setting  out  for  a  rumored  America  is  hardly  upon 
a  less  foreseen  adventure.  She  had  moments  of  panic  when 
nothing  but  the  life-long  habit  of  military  obedience  pulled 
her  through — saved  her  from  begging  to  be  let  off.  To  have 
begged  would  seem  as  disgraceful  to  her  as  it  would  to  her 
father. 

But,  these  bad  hours  aside,  there  was  a  joyous  thrill  about 
the  prospect  that  was  almost  as  disconcerting  as  the  panic. 
It  didn't  seem  loyal  to  be  as  happy  as  it  made  her  feel  to  think 
of  going  to  "the  right  kind  of  school"  where  she'd  make 
friends  with  girls  of  her  own  age.  She  hadn't  had  a  girl  friend 
since  she  was  seven  years  old.  And  the  notion  of  pretty 
frocks — plenty  of  them,  and  a  big  house  with  real  servants 
in  it — acting  the  way  they  do  in  books — "Yes,  Miss.  Thank 
you,  Miss" — and  a  motor  she  would  be  entitled  to  ride  in  was 
thrilling.  "Would  Uncle  Frank  let  her  learn  to  drive  it  herself? 

What  gave  the  adventure  the  silky  unbelievable  texture  of 
a  fairy-tale  from  the  moment  of  her  arrival  in  Chicago,  almost, 
was  the  wedding  of  Anne  Corbett,  her  Aunt  Constance's 
younger  sister.  The  romance  began,  it  happened,  right  at  the 
beginning. 

Jean's  train,  which  Frank  Crawford  had  engaged  to  meet, 
frustrated  him  by  getting  very  late  and  then  in  the  last 
couple  of  hours  making  up  half  an  hour  or  so,  with  the  result 
that  Jean,  emerging  through  the  gate  and  looking  in  vain 
for  a  familiar  face,  found  herself  upon  her  own  resources. 

She  was  not  at  all  alarmed  and  she  adopted  almost  at  once 
the  correct  explanation  of  her  uncle's  failure  to  be  there. 
There  were  various  things  she  could  do.  She  could  find  out 
at  the  Information  Bureau  how  to  get  to  Lake  Forest,  where 
the  Crawfords  lived,  and  go  out  there  all  by  herself.  Only 
that  might  give  them  a  bad  hour  or  two  wondering  what  had 
become  of  her.  Or,  she  could  telephone  her  Aunt  Constance 
and  put  herself  under  orders.  But  that  seemed  a  rather  help 
less,  bothersome  way  to  act.  Her  aunt,  no  doubt,  was  busy 


THE    HOUSE  7 

and  would  probably,  Jean  suspected,  put  herself  to  superfluous 
trouble  about  her. 

There  remained  the  third  alternative  of  simply  waiting  in 
the  station  for  her  uncle  to  turn  up.  Only  how  would  he  find 
her  in  a  big  place  like  that?  The  likeliest  place  to  wait  for 
him,  she  decided,  was  under  the  train  bulletin,  which  he  would 
probably  consult  as  soon  as  he  came  in  for  the  purpose  of 
finding  out  how  much  longer  he'd  have  to  wait. 

So  she  lugged  her  suit-case  over  to  the  big  blackboard  and 
took  her  station  there.  She  was  quite  comfortable  both  in 
body  and  mind.  She  had  learned  from  her  father  the  military 
trick  of  standing  still  without  getting  tired,  and  she  wasn't 
worried  a  bit.  She  would  give  her  uncle  half  an  hour.  If 
he  had  not  come  by  then,  she  would  telephone  to  Lake  Forest. 
Meantime  there  were  plenty  of  amusing  things  to  look  at. 

She  was  aware,  of  course,  that  other  people  were  looking 
at  her.  There  were  men  loitering  about  the  place — men  of 
various  sorts,  who  looked  at  her  a  good  deal.  But  she  was 
not  afraid  of  their  annoying  her.  People  somehow  didn't. 

Presently  her  own  interest  focussed  itself  upon  a  man — a 
big  man,  a  lot  taller  than  her  father  she  was  sure,  though  he 
stood  a  full  six  feet — who  came  up  to  consult  the  train  bul 
letin.  There  was  a  sort  of  general  Tightness  about  him  that 
gave  her  a  little  thrill  of  pleasure  the  moment  he  came  into 
her  field  of  vision.  To  her  eye,  accustomed  to  a  military 
precision  of  gait  and  carriage,  there  was  something  pleasur- 
ably  flexible  about  the  way  he  moved. 

She  got  a  chance  to  look  at  his  face  while  he  was  studying 
the  board.  It  was  a  lean,  rather  narrow,  face,  just  a  little 
like — not  the  real  Indians  she  had  seen  so  many  of,  but  the 
sculptured,  idealized  Indians — bronze  Indians  in  parks.  She 
liked  the  look  in  his  face,  too,  when  he  saw  how  late  his 
train  was,  the  train  he  was  waiting  for  some  one  to  come  in  on ; 
rueful  but  half  amused,  as  if,  after  all,  it  didn't  greatly  mat 
ter.  It  couldn't  be,  she  decided,  his  wife  or  sweetheart  he  was 
waiting  for. 

Just  as  he  turned  away  he  looked  at  her,  his  eye  simply 


8  AN   AMERTCAX    FAMILY 

picking  her  up  as  it  traversed  the  space  she  occupied,  and 
focussing  itself  on  her  for  an  instant,  very  keenly. 

He  set  himself  a  long,  leisurely  patrol  of  the  concourse 
from  one  end  to  the  other,  and  always  as  he  receded  from  her, 
she  let  her  gaze  follow  him.  It  seemed  to  her  that  if  any 
thing  happened — anything  violent  or  frightful,  there  in  that 
railway  station,  that  he  would  be  quite  certain  to  be  in  the 
thick  of  it  doing  tremendous  deeds.  She  made  up  an  idle  little 
romance  about  him  and  cast  herself  for  the  heroine. 

The  romance  was  broken  in  upon  by  the  realization  that  a 
little  group  of  rowdy  youths — harmless  enough,  no  doubt,  but 
an  affront  alike  to  the  eye  and  the  ear,  with  their  jokes,  their 
nudges,  their  vacuous  laughs,  their  shoves  and  bumps  and  re 
monstrances — had  her  for  an  objective;  for  an  audience  any 
way.  They  weren't  dangerous,  of  course,  but  she  hoped  they 
wouldn't  come  any  nearer.  If  they  did,  she'd  have  to  pick 
up  her  bag  and  move  away.  And  that  act  in  itself  would  be 
a  form  of  communication  with  them. 

And  then  she  caught  her  breath.  Because  her  big  man, 
coming  by  just  then,  checked  his  patrol,  turned  at  right 
angles,  and  walked  up  beside  her;  not  close  beside — a  couple 
of  paces,  maybe,  away.  He  didn't  speak  to  her  nor  look 
at  her.  So  far  as  she  could  see,  he  didn't  even  look  at 
the  boys.  But  the  little  group  faded  aimlessly  away.  He 
stayed — not  rigid  like  a  sentry,  nor  elaborately  casual  either, 
but  clearly  on  guard.  If  her  father's  battery  of  three-inch 
field-pieces  had  come  galloping  up  and  parked  around  her, 
she  couldn't  have  felt  more  secure. 

If  only  there  were  some  possible  way  of  thanking  him! 
Only,  if  he'd  wanted  to  be  thanked  he  could  easily  have  given 
her  the  opportunity.  Of  course  he  wouldn't.  He  wasn't  the 
sort  that  would. 

Five  minutes  later  she  caught  a  sight  of  Frank  Crawford 
hurrying  toward  the  board.  Could  she  tell  him  about  it, 
she  wondered  ?  Get  him  to  tell  the  stranger  how  much  obliged 
she  was?  It  seemed  dreadfully  unsatisfactory  just  to  go  off 
and  leave  him  there  without  any  acknowledgment — not  even 
a  bow. 


THE    HOUSE  9 

To  Her  surprise,  it  was  not  upon  her,  but  upon  the  tall 
stranger  that  her  uncle's  eye  alighted. 

"Hello,  Hugh!"  he  sang  out.  "What  are  you  doing  down 
here?" 

"I'm  collecting  another  bridesmaid  for  Anne,"  Jean  heard 
him  say.  His  voice,  she  thought,  was — well,  somehow,  just 
right,  like  the  rest  of  him.  "Half  an  hour  yet  to  wait." 

"I'm  meeting  my  .  .  ."  Frank  began.  "Why,  hello! 
How  in  the  world  did  you  get  here?  They  said  your  train 
was  two  hours  late." 

"It  made  up  a  little,"  Jean  explained.  "I  haven't  been 
waiting  long." 

Her  uncle  was  most  awfully  sorry.  Was  she  sure  she  was 
all  right?  Hadn't  been  frightened  or  anything? 

"Not  a  bit,"  said  Jean. 

"Well,  come  along,"  her  uncle  said.  "The  car  is  here. 
We'll  drive  straight  out."  Then,  "Oh! — this  is  my  niece, 
Jean  Gilbert." 

It  was  one  of  those  one-sided  introductions  that  Frank 
was  addicted  to  when  he  felt  in  a  hurry.  But  the  big  man 
swiftly  rectified  it. 

"I'm  Hugh  Corbett,"  he  told  her,  and  held  out  a  lean 
hand.  "I'll  probably  see  you  again  before  the  wedding,  but 
surely  then." 

It  was  a  friendly,  altogether  delightful  smile  he  had,  a 
rather — special  smile.  There  was  a  humorous  recognition  in 
it  of  the  something  between  them — the  almost  nothing  but 
not  quite — which  neither  of  them  had  said  anything  to  Frank 
about. 

"He's  Constance's  brother,"  Frank  explained  as  they 
walked  away ;  "one  of  her  four  brothers.  They're  all  here  for 
the  wedding." 

Jean  rode  out  to  Lake  Forest  entranced.  The  dim  out 
lines  of  the  fairy-tale  were  already  beginning  to  show  through. 
Jean  inquired  with  great  propriety  about  her  grandmother 
and  could  not  be  blamed  for  an  inaudible  sigh  of  relief  on 
learning  that  the  old  lady  was  not  at  home.  She  was  still 
at  Hot  Springs — an  annual  pilgrimage  of  hers  for  fortifying 


10  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

her  invincible  health  against  all  conceivable  attack.  She 
would  not  come  anywhere  near  Lake  Michigan  until  that  mer 
curial  climate  had  settled  to  its  six  months  of  good  behavior. 
She  figured,  naturally  enough,  in  Jean's  fairy-tale  as  the 
wicked  old  witch. 

The  queen,  that  is  to  say  her  Aunt  Constance,  was  still  to 
be  reckoned  with.  But  the  first  evening — oh,  the  first  five 
minutes  really,  settled  all  that.  Constance's  smile,  like  that 
of  her  brother  Hugh,  had  something  special  about  it;  a 
humorous  friendliness. 

"You  won't  mind,"  she  asked  (this  was  when  Jean  was 
going  to  bed  and  her  aunt  had  come  in,  ostensibly  to  see  that 
she  had  everything  that  she  wanted) ;  "you  won't  mind  if  I — 
play  dolls  with  you  a  little?  You  see  my  two  are  both  boys 
and  you  can't  do  it  with  them.  I'd  like  to  dress  you  up.  Will 
you  go  shopping  with  me  in  the  morning  ?" 

Thus  it  was  that  Constance  changed  her  role  to  that  of  the 
fairy  godmother.  They  were,  of  course,  simple,  suitable 
things  that  Constance  bought  the  next  day.  But  she  did  a 
thorough  job ;  provided  for  all  reasonable  contingencies.  And 
Jean,  to  whom  any  single  new  garment  had  always  been  an 
important  event,  who  had  never  dreamed  of  being  new  all 
over,  was  in  Paradise. 

She  couldn't  have  believed  that  the  day  had  not  reached  its 
climax  in  the  purchase  of  a  pink  dancing  frock,  almost  low 
in  the  neck,  and  with  slippers  and  stockings  that  matched. 
But  it  had  not.  The  real  climax  was  late  that  afternoon. 

"I  want  to  stop  in  and  see  mother  a  few  minutes,"  Con 
stance  had  said,  "before  we  go  home."  And  Jean  caught  her 
breath  again  when  she  saw  where  the  car  was  turning  in. 

A  high  iron  fence  with  a  monumental  gate  in  it,  a  wide 
insolent  lawn  that  reached  from  one  cross-street  to  the  next, 
and  had  its  own  opinion,  evidently,  of  the  ornate,  close-built 
mansions  on  either  side  that  had  to  get  up  to  the  Lake  Shore 
Drive  somehow.  In  the  middle  of  it  a  house  that  .  .  . 
Well,  Gregory  Corbett  remains  one  of  the  few  Chicagoans  of 
the  great  old  days  who  managed  to  get  himself  adequately 
represented  in  stone.  Whoever  the  architect  was  (Fm  not 


THE    HOUSE  11 

sure  whether  it  was  Richardson  or  not)  he  succeeded  in  build 
ing  something  that  stood  unmistakably  for  the  old  man.  The 
sand-stone  of  which  he  built  it  was  Gregory  Corbett's  color; 
the  great  monolithic  lintels  had  something  the  look  of  his 
level  craggy  brows.  The  whole  thing  was  self-contained  like 
him,  and  heavy,  and  enormously  big,  and  one  had  the  feeling 
that  it  would  live  to  be  old  like  him — as  old  for  a  house  as 
he  was  for  a  man. 

To  Jean,  of  course,  the  fairy-tale  took  another  jump.  Here 
was  the  palace,  the  face  of  it  dark  against  the  declining  sun. 
Anything  could  happen  in  a  place  like  this. 

She  followed,  breathless,  close  behind  Constance,  aware,  but 
afraid  to  look,  that  there  were  a  lot  of  people  about,  that 
there  was  a  victrola  going  somewhere  and,  she  thought,  danc 
ing;  that  a  deferential  gentleman  in  a  premature  dress-suit 
was  conveying  a  low-toned  message  to  her  aunt. 

"All  right,"  Constance  said.  "Come  along,"  and  Jean 
followed  her  up  a  very  broad  and  endlessly  long  flight  of 
stairs,  down  a  hall  and  to  a  door  where  Constance  knocked. 

It  was  opened  by  a  maid,  but  before  either  she  or  Con 
stance  could  speak  a  banrtone  voice  boomed  out  from  the 
depths  of  the  room,  "Who  is  it?" 

Constance  said  who  she  was,  and  added,  "I've  got  Jean 
Gilbert  with  me." 

"Bring  her  along,"  the  voice  commanded.  "Where  have 
you  been?  I've  been  wanting  you  for  hours." 

Her  aunt's  repl}T,  whatever  it  may  have  been,  was  lost  on 
Jean,  because  by  that  time  she  was  in  the  room,  and  all  she 
could  manage  for  a  moment  was  a  panic-stricken  attempt  not 
to  stare. 

A  big — oh,  a  huge ! — iron-gray  woman  sat  in  a  propor 
tionate  armchair.  Her  hair  was  formally  dressed,  as  if  for 
a  ball.  She  had  on  a  black  satin  dressing-gown  with  enor 
mous  red  and  yellow  tulips  on  it.  A  table  with  a  tea-tray 
stood  beside  her  chair.  She  held  a  cup  in  one  hand  and 
a  slice  of  bread  and  butter  in  the  other.  Crouching  before 
her  was  a  man  with  a  black  leather  bag  on  the  floor  beside 
•him.  Her  feet  and  her  thick  white  calves  were  bare,  and  he 


13  AN    AMEPJCAX    FAMILY 

was  working  away,  with  a  little  chisel-shaped  knife  at  one  of 
her  toes. 

"Kennedy  here,"  she  said,  indicating  him  by  pointing  with 
the  foot,  "although  I'm  his  oldest  customer,  and  getting  a 
daughter  married  off  besides,  won't  leave  that  precious  office 
of  his  till  after  hours.  That's  why  he's  here  now.  I've  no 
doubt  there  are  better  men  at  his  business  here  in  town  that 
would,  but  in  matters  of  corns  I'm  conservative." 

"Mother,"  Constance  said,  turning  to  Jean,  "this  is    .     .     ." 

"I  don't  need  to  be  told  who  she  is,"  Mrs.  Corbett  broke 
in.  She  finished  her  tea  in  a  gulp,  set  down  her  cup  and  held 
the  disengaged  hand  out  to  the  girl.  "Let's  look  at  you,  child. 
You're  your  mother  again — with  a  difference.  Heavens,  how 
have  you  had  time  to  get  as  big  as  that?  It  seems  no  time 
at  all  since  your  mother  ran  off  with  that  lieutenant  of  hers. 
Do  you  want  some  tea  ?  If  you  do,  tell  Briggs  and  she'll  get 
it  up.  Sit  down  somewhere  anyway.  I  want  to  talk  to  your 
aunt." 

Thus  released,  Jean  retreated  to  a  window-seat — about  the 
remotest  place  in  sight;  out  of  range,  she  hoped,  of  the  con 
fidential  conversation  which  was  to  follow.  She  knew  now 
who  was  the  queen  of  the  fairy  story.  She  had  never  under 
stood  what  they  were  like  before. 

In  thinking  she  had  withdrawn  out  of  ear-shot,  Jean  had 
reckoned  without  Mrs.  Corbett's  voice.  It  boomed  straight 
along  without  any  soft-pedal  at  all.  There  was  no  use  trying 
not  to  hear. 

"I've  got  to  have  you  down  here,  Connie,  and  that's  flat. 
You'll  have  to  come  to  the  house  and  stay  till  it's  over.  Be 
tween  my  father-in-law  and  my  feet,  I'm  done.  I  don't  blame 
my  feet.  They're  overworked.  I'm  too  big  to  trot  around, 
though  I  could  manage  it  if  it  weren't  for  him.  But  this 
wedding  has  stirred  him  up.  He  wouldn't  believe  for  a  long 
time,  that  'little  Anne'  was  old  enough  to  be  married.  Every 
time  we  spoke  of  it,  he  pretended  not  to  know  what  we  were 
talking  about. 

"Now  that  he's  made  up  his  mind  to  it,  he  wants  to  know 
what's  the  matter  with  the  boys — why  none  of  them  is  mar- 


THE    HOUSE  13 

ried.  He  roars  at  me  till  I  can't  hear  myself  think;  as  if  it 
was  my  fault.  Your  father  simply  takes  to  flight;  gets  tele 
grams  and  things;  and  the  boys  are  too  wary  by  half.  They 
dodge  around  like  quick-silver.  I'm  too  big  to  dodge.  When 
I  married  Robert,,  it  was  grandsons  his  father  wanted.  Well, 
he  can't  deny  I  did  my  best  for  him.  Now  it's  great- 
grandsons.  And  he  looks  to  me  for  them." 

"He's  got  two,"  said  Constance. 

"They  don't  count/'  her  mother  assured  her  bluntly.  "They 
aren't  Corbetts.  Oh,  unreasonable  I'll  agree !  Well,  I  may  be 
unreasonable  myself  when  I'm  eighty-one.  But  that  doesn't 
make  it  any  easier  for  me  just  now.  I've  got  to  have  you  on 
the  spot.  You  can  take  him  off  my  hands,  or  you  can  chap 
eron  some  of  these  parties  and  let  me  get  off  my  feet;  that's 
just  as  you  like." 

What  Constance  said  was  lower-keyed,  and  Jean  didn't 
hear  it,  but  the  mother's  reply  made  the  nature  of  it  evident 
enough. 

"Oh,  Frank's  a  fuss !  What  if  you.  are  going  to  have  a 
baby !  If  I  hadn't  kept  going  with  mine,  I'd  never  have  got 
anywhere,  heaven  knows." 

There  was  another  inaudible  fragment  contributed  by  Con 
stance,  then  Mrs.  Corbett  said : 

"Jean?  Oh,  bring  her  along  with  you.  There's  room. 
She's  a  nice  little  thing;  knows  how  to  stand  up,  which  is 
more  than  most  girls  do  now-a-days.  She'll  be  somebody  to 
play  with  Carter.  Has  she  got  any  clothes?  Not  that  it 
matters." 

It  was  getting  to  seem  like  a  dream,  the  way  the  fairy 
story  moved  along.  No  sooner  had  the  fairy  godmother  pro 
vided  the  ball  dress  than  the  queen  invited  her  to  come  and 
stay  at  the  palace.  It  was — well,  scary  in  a  way,  to  have 
things  happen  like  that.  One  thing  bothered  her  a  little. 
Who  was  Carter  whom  she  was  to  play  with  ? 

Driving  out  to  Lake  Forest  for  dinner  (because  Mrs.  Cor 
bett  had  failed  to  induce  her  daughter  to  abandon  Frank 
without  at  least  an  evening's  warning.  They  were  to  come 
straight  back  after  breakfast)  she  asked  Constance  about  him. 


14  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

"I  tried  not  to  hear/'  she  explained,  "but  somehow  I  couldn't 
help  it." 

Constance  laughed.  "No.  Mother's  not  a  confidential  per 
son.  Why,  Carter's  her  baby — my  youngest  brother.  He's 
twenty;  has  just  finished  his  junior  year  at  Yale.  We're  all 
very  proud  of  him,"  she  went  on,  "because  he  made  end  on 
the  All- American  last  fall  and  Bones  this  spring. 

"I  suppose,"  she  concluded  thoughtfully,  "that  Carter  will 
never  be  as  old  again  as  he  is  right  now.  Mother's  funny 
with  him  because  she  doesn't  see  that  at  all." 

Jean  was  vague  about  the  Ail-American,  and  Bones  was 
an  unelucidated  mystery  to  her.  But  her  aunt's  intention 
to  warn  her  not  to  count  upon  Carter  as  a  playmate  was  un 
mistakable.  She  might  easily  have  been  a  little  alarmed  over 
the  prospect  of  meeting  so  formidable  a  person,  had  it  not 
been  for  her  encounter  in  the  railway  station  the  day  before. 
The  big  man  who  had  stood  guard  over  her  for  fifteen  minutes, 
not  knowing  in  the  least  who  she  was,  and  then,  finding  out, 
had  made  himself,  with  just  one  look  of  his  smiling  eyes, 
completely  her  friend — almost  an  older  friend  than  her  uncle 
was — that  man  was  this  terrifying  Carter's  big  brother.  With 
him  at  hand  she  need  not  be  afraid  of  anybody. 

The  next  real  step  in  the  fairy  story  happened  three  days 
before  the  wedding,  right  when  the  whirl  of  luncheons,  matinee 
parties,  tea-dances,  dinners  and  so  on,  was  at  its  swiftest. 
It  had  to  be  a  tragedy  for  somebody  else.  That's  the  way 
things  happen  in  fairy  stories. 

Muriel  Ware,  one  of  the  bridesmaids,  developed  a  stye.  Of 
course,  it  had  not  been  a  sudden  event  for  her.  There  had 
been  a  day  when  she  caught  up  her  hand-mirror  and  looked 
at  that  eyelid  with  suspicion,  and  told  herself  positively  that 
it  was  nothing;  another  day  when  she  spent  her  solitary 
moments  rubbing  it  frantically  with  a  gold  ring,  studying 
it  in  the  glass  and  deciding  it  was  really  going  away ;  another 
day  when  people  began  looking  at  her  and  asking  what  was 
the  matter  with  her  eye,  to  which  she  had  answered  that  she 
had  almost  had  a  stye,  but  that  it  was  getting  better.  There 


THE    HOUSE  15 

was  a  day  when  she  flew  despairingly  to  the  doctor  and  de 
manded  surgery — capital  surgery,  if  necessary — anything — 
absolutely  anything,  to  stop  that  thing.  The  resources  of 
modern  surgery,  the  doctor  had  said,  were  equal,  one  might 
say,  to  anything  except  the  instantaneous  obliteration  of  all 
traces  of  its  work.  But  for  that  no  substitute  had  yet  been 
discovered  for  time.  There  was  nothing  to  be  alarmed  about. 
In  a  week  or  ten  days  she  would  be  looking  as  well  as  ever. 
The  wedding  was  three  days  off. 

By  the  next  day  the  eye  was  swollen  shut  and  had  to  be 
taken  official  cognizance  of.  Muriel  couldn't  go  down  the 
church  aisle  looking  like  that — a  fact  she  was  the  first  to 
proclaim.  Of  course,  it  might  get  miraculously  better  in 
two  days,  but  was  there  any  real  hope  of  it?  No,  there  was 
not.  Somebody  would  have  to  be  found  who  could  wear  her 
dress — take  her  place. 

But  who?  The  matter  was  delicate.  Months  ago  Anne 
had  divided  her  friends  into  two  categories :  those  who  were 
asked  to  be  bridesmaids  and  those  who  were  not.  Anne  pro 
fessed  herself  at  her  wit's  end  and  rejected  the  few  suggestions 
made,  with  vigor,  demanding  to  be  told,  meanwhile,  if  no 
one  could  think  of  anybody. 

By  the  time  some  one  said,  with  the  air  of  making  a  sur 
prising  discovery,  "Why  wouldn't  Jean  do?"  the  child  had 
been  holding  her  breath,  one  might  say,  for  hours. 

She  had  been  watching  that  stye  with  the  eye  of  a  lynx, 
since  the  day  Muriel  herself  had  discovered  it.  She  had  re 
proached  herself  bitterly  for  not  feeling  honestly  sorry  as  she 
saw  it  grow,  saw  inevitable  Fate  closing  down  upon  its  vic 
tim.  Her  heart  stopped  beating  entirely,  she  was  sure,  when 
she  heard  the  suggestion  made,  and  didn't  go  on  until  Anne 
said,  meditatively,  "I  believe  she  could  wear  the  dress."  And 
then  it  leaped  up  with  a  rush  that  almost  suffocated  her.  It 
was  as  good  as  decided  after  that.  Xot  even  Mrs.  Corbett's 
blunt  inquiry  about  her  age  did  any  harm. 

The  dress  was  right  almost  to  the  last  hook,  and  with  her 
hair  up  ("You've  awfully  nice  hair,"  one  of  the  girls  said) 


16  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

she  should  make  as  satisfactory  a  bridesmaid  as  any  bride 
could  ask  to  have. 

Well,  you  are  in  possession  now,  I  think,  of  the  facts  which 
formed  the  background  of  Jean's  dream  as  she  lay  awake 
that  warm  June  night,  looking  out  now  and  then  for  the 
gray  streak  of  dawn  and  hoping  not  to  fall  asleep;  at  least 
not  until  it  came.  A  background,  I  said,  but  I  am  not  sure 
but  foreground  would  be  a  truer  word,  because  the  thing  to 
which  they  all  were  nothing  but  a  running  obbligato,  the 
melody  they  merely  served  to  harmonize,  was,  after  all,  elusive 
— shy  of  coming  out  in  the  open  and  getting  itself  stated. 

If  ever  you  have  heard  a  set  of  variations  by  Elgar  upon 
a  theme  which  is  never  played  during  the  whole  composition, 
you  will  have  a  clue  to  the  pleasant  maze  of  Jean's  reverie 
that  night.  Her  theme,  never  stated  but  perpetually  em 
broidered  upon,  was  that  she  had  fallen  in  love  with  Hugh 
Corbett. 

I  know  of  nothing  less  calculated,  or  calculable — nothing 
more  reckless  in  its  disregard  of  facts  and  reciprocities — noth 
ing,  in  a  word,  more  mothlike  in  its  evanescent  nocturnal 
charm,  than  a  young  girl's  love  affair. 

It  had  happened,  of  course,  there  in  the  railway  station 
before  she  found  out  who  he  was.  And  it  might  have  lasted 
her  for  weeks,  in  the  failure  of  another  to  take  its  place,  even 
if  she  hadn't  found  out  at  all ;  just  as  a  peg  upon  which  to 
hang  her  filmy  night-spun  veils  of  romance. 

But  with  his  transformation  by  Frank's  nod  into  some  one 
she  knew  and  liked,  the  thing  got  a  novel  touch  of  reality. 
Every  day,  after  that,  the  romance  accumulated  new  facts 
to  build  on.  He  really  liked  her,  made  occasions  for  little 
talks  with  her;  came  to  the  rescue,  sometimes,  when  she  was 
embarrassed,  just  as  he  had  done  there  in  the  station. 

Everybody  liked  her,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  beginning  with 
old  Grandfather  Corbett  and  stopping  just  before  you  got 
to  Carter  (who  might  not  have  been  the  one  exception  but  for  a 
tactless  indication  on  his  mother's  part  that  Jean's  age  made 
her  a  suitable  companion  for  him.  After  that  there  was  no 
balm  for  his  outraged  dignity  except  in  ignoring  her  as 


THE    HOUSE  17 

loftily  as  possible).  She  was  so  breathless  with  wonder  about 
it  all,  so  serious  in  her  acceptance  of  the  responsibilities  which 
Muriel's  stye  had  thrust  upon  her,  her  dignity  was  so  de 
licious,  and  her  unconscious  way  of  coming  to  attention,  heels 
together,  eyes  front,  when  she  had  to  nerve  herself  to  meet 
a  difficult  situation,  that  they  all  enjoyed  her.  They  alter 
nately  teased  and  petted  her,  that  is,  just  as  one  will  a  nico 
kitten. 

All  but  Hugh.  He  won  her  ineffable  gratitude  by  being 
different.  It  was  not  that  he  acted  differently  toward  her; 
not  that  he  treated  her  like  a  young  lady.  He  laughed  and 
joked  about  her  as  freely  as  any  of  them,  only  when  he  did 
it  she  was  always  one  of  the  players  of  the  game — not  just 
the  ball  they  played  with.  He  had  no  special  manner  for 
her  at  all  (she  presently  discovered  that  he  had  none  for  any 
body — not  even  for  his  grandfather),  and  the  fact  made  it 
curiously  easy  to  talk  to  him;  especially  to  ask  him  things — 
and  there  were  no  end  of  them — that  she  wanted  to  know. 

He  told  her  who  people  were  and  how  old  they  were  and 
what  they  did — a  sort  of  Who's  Who  to  the  Corbett  clan,  in 
valuable  to  her  and,  as  he  told  it,  most  amusing.  He  told 
her  stories  about  his  grandfather,  who  had  started  out  as  a. 
wheelwright  more  than  sixty  years  ago  making  farm  wagons ; 
how  he  had  gone  into  partnership  with  his  cousin  who  made 
plows  and  then  bought  him  out,  and  how  a  family  feud  that 
had  lasted  half  a  century  had  resulted.  He  told  of  his  father's 
hobby  for  pictures,  especially  Corots.  (He  had  bought  more 
of  those,  Hugh  extravagantly  opined,  than  Corot  had  ever 
painted.)  He  told  her  some  of  the  stock  family  anecdotes 
that  were  always  being  referred  to. 

On  her  first  bewildering  day  at  the  "palace"  he  sorted  out 
his  brothers  for  her  and  his  prospective  brother-in-law  from 
the  ruck  of  guests,  groomsmen  and  so  on.  "The  darkest  one 
with  the  thick  black  hair — over  there;  he  just  came  in  that 
door — that's  Gregory,  after  grandfather,  of  course.  He's  the 
successful  one.  He  has  come  right  up  through  the  business, 
has  practically  taken  father's  place  in  it ;  but  what  lie's  really 
famous  for  is  football.  He  played  guard,  back  in  the  days  of 


18  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

mass  formation,  and  he  still  goes  back  to  New  Haven  in  the 
fall  and  coaches  for  a  month — takes  his  vacation  that  way. 
And  the  sandy  one  over  there,  flirting  with  the  girl  in  blue, 
is  Bob — after  father.  He's  the  polo  player.  He  lives  out  at 
the  ranch  in  Wyoming  a  good  part  of  the  time;  thinks  he 
runs  it.  He's  two  years  younger  than  I,  and  Greg  two  years 
older.  We  all  come  along  after  Constance.  Then,  after  a 
while,  comes  Anne,  and  Carter  last.  You  know  the  man 
Anne's  marrying,  don't  you?  Douglas  Duncan?  They're 
New  York  people,  a  good  lot  though  they're  what's  called 
'smart/  Anne's  supposed  to  have  done  very  well.  Well, 
that's  the  lot." 

A  rather  terrifying  lot,  too,  she  thought  at  the  time;  they 
were  all,  except  Anne  and  Carter,  so  prodigiously  big,  and  all, 
without  exception,  so  confidently  sure  of  themselves.  Only, 
with  Hugh  around,  she  wasn't  so  very  much  afraid  of  them. 

He  was  different,  somehow,  from  them  all.  She  felt  this 
much  more  deeply  than  she  could  formulate  it.  She  had 
commented,  with  what  seemed  incredible  boldness,  upon  his 
omission  to  tell  her,  along  with  the  other  biographies,  what 
he  himself  did — and  was  famous  for. 

"Oh,"  he  said,  "I'm  supposed  to  be  a  metallurgist.  I'm 
down  at  Youngstown,  mostly,  analyzing  the  steels  and  other 
metals  they  buy  for  the  plant.  It's  a  very  routine  sort  of 
work.  You  don't  get  famous  at  it." 

After  that  talk,  he  figured  in  her  romance  as  a  banished 
prince,  out  of  favor  through  no  fault  of  his,  rather  as  the 
result  of  his  own  nobility — opposed  either  by  the  ignorance 
of  some  one  who  could  not  understand  it,  or  by  the  malice 
of  some  one  who  hated  it.  But  he  would  come  into  his  own 
some  day. 

This  was  all  very  silly,  she  knew.  She  blushed  over  tho?e 
romances  in  the  daytime,  if  she  happened  to  think  of  them. 
There  wasn't  a  trace  of  self-pity  about  him.  He  didn't  act 
the  least  bit  disinherited.  And  all  the  family  seemed  fond 
of  him. 

But  wasn't  there,  romance  aside,  a  real  difference  which 
the  clan  itself  was  aware  of  ?  Hadn't  Jean  heard  the  phrases 


THE    HOUSE  19 

"That's  just  like  Hugh !  Hugh  all  over !  Oh,  of  course — 
Hugh!"  from  every  one  of  them?  And  had  she  ever  heard 
anything  that  Gregory  did  characterized  as  just  like  him? — 
or  Anne,  or  Carter,  or  Robert?  That  proved  something, 
didn't  it  ?  Didn't  they  feel  about  him  just  a  little  as  she  had 
felt  almost  the  first  moment  she  saw  him,  there  in  the  rail 
way  station,  the  latent  possibility  of  his  doing  extraordinary 
things,  if  the  sort  of  circumstances  arose  that  provoked  them 
— things  that  Gregory  or  Bob  in  any  circumstances  could  be 
counted  upon  not  to  do  ? 

She  sighed,  sat  up  once  more  in  bed  and  looked  out  at  the 
night.  She  was  afraid  she  was  getting  a  little  sleepy.  She 
would  think  about  something  very  exciting — the  dinner  dance 
they  had  had  at  the  house  to-night,  in  which  festivity  she, 
as  a  prospective  bridesmaid,  had  had  a  part  like  a  regular 
grown-up  person,  Hugh  and  one  of  the  groomsmen  on  either 
hand  at  dinner,  and  all  her  dances  taken  afterward. 

There  was  just  one  flaw  in  the  perfection  of  that  party. 
She  had  lost  a  treasure.  On  the  back  of  her  place-card  at 
dinner,  Hugh  had  written  out  for  her,  in  his  fine  clear  hand, 
an  amusing  toast  that  he  had  picked  up  somewhere  on  his 
travels.  It  was  very  hard  to  say  straight  and  she,  trying  to 
learn  it,  had  asked  him  to  write  it  down.  It  was  as  a  souvenir 
of  him  that  she  had  really  wanted  it,  of  course.  It  would  be 
her  only  memorial,  and  he  was  going  back  to  Youngstown 
the  night  of  the  wedding.  She  might  not  see  him  again  for 
years.  If  only  she  had  left  it  tucked  safely  inside  her  dress 
where  she  had  surreptitiously  deposited  it  as  they  were  leav 
ing  the  dining-room !  But  she  had  fished  it  out  to  gloat  over 
it,  and  then — shame  of  shames! — forgotten  it.  Later,  of 
course,  she  had  become  aware  of  her  loss  and  tried  vainly 
to  remember  where  she  had  left  it.  She  had  had  no  real  op 
portunity  for  search.  But  now,  at  half  past  three  in  the 
morning,  it  came  to  her  in  a  flash,  exactly  where  the  thing 
was;  tucked  half-way  down  between  two  of  the  cushions  of 
the  long  davenport  in  the  billiard-room.  Why  couldn't  she 
have  remembered  before  it  was  too  late  ? 

Because  it  was  too  late.     The  army  of  servants  that  went 


20  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

to  work  long  before  any  one  else  was  up  in  the  morning,  never 
missed  a  scrap.  Her  treasure  would  be  cleared  up  and  thrown 
away  before  she  could  recover  it. 

Unless  she  went  now !  Why  not  ?  She  was  sure  she  could 
do  it  without  disturbing  anybody.  There  was  moonlight 
enough  to  keep  her  from  running  into  things,  and  she'd  go 
very  carefully.  And  in  a  great  solid  house  like  this  a  little 
noise  wouldn't  travel  very  far. 

Trembling  a  little  with  the  excitement  of  the  venture — she 
was  certainly  wide  enough  awake  now — she  put  on  the  silk 
dressing-gown — one  of  the  most  superfluously  delightful  of 
Constance's  purchases,  and  the  bedroom  slippers,  opened  her 
door  and  shut  it  behind  her  with  infinite  care,  and  stole  down 
stairs. 

The  adventure  was  rather  more  scary  than  she  had  antici 
pated.  The  great  rooms  she  had  to  traverse  on  the  way  to 
the  billiard-room  were  ghostly  in  their  silent  emptiness.  Sup 
pose  she  did  knock  something  down?  Suppose  there  were 
some  special  servant,  an  indoor  night-watchman,  awake  now, 
going  his  rounds,  likely  to  come  upon  her  any  minute  and  ask 
her  what  she  was  doing  there?  What  explanation  could  she 
possibly  give  ? 

She  was  so  thoroughly  self -convicted  of  being  a  prowling 
intruder  that  when  she  first  heard,  unmistakably,  the  foot 
steps  of  some  one  else  moving  about  in  the  adjoining  room, 
she  thought  of  no  alternative  explanation  to  the  one  she  had 
just  been  supposing:  namely,  that  it  was  some  one  authori 
tatively  on  duty.  She  shrank  back  against  the  wall  and  began, 
in  a  rather  panicky  way,  trying  to  decide  between  the  relative 
advisability  of  a  flight  back  to  her  room  and  the  standing 
of  her  ground. 

It  was  a  minute  or  two  later  that  the  word  burglar  said 
itself  very  distinctly  in  her  mind.  There  had  been  a  momen 
tary  sheen  of  reflected  light  on  one  of  the  door-panels,  as  if 
an  electric  torch  had  been  switched  on  and,  as  quickly  as 
possible,  off  again.  Somehow,  that  didn't  seem  like  a  watch 
man.  Nor  did  the  silence  in  there.  People  on  guard  kept 


THE    HOUSE  21 

moving  about.  The  room  lie  was  in  was  the  library.  Hadn't 
she  heard  Anne  say  something  about  a  safe  in  the  library  ? 

For  a  moment  she  went  limp ;  not  so  much  from  fear  of  a 
possible  burglar  as  from  a  realization  of  her  dilemma.  What 
could  she  do? 

She  could  quite  safely,  no  doubt,  go  back  to  bed  and  leave 
whoever  was  in  the  library  to  his  own  devices.  Even  if  he 
proved,  next  morning,  to  have  been  a  burglar  who  had  got 
away  with  valuable  booty,  no  one  would  dream  of  asking  her 
anything  about  it.  This  was  the  counsel  of  sheer  cowardice, 
of  course,  and  instantly  dismissed  with  an  impatient  shake 
of  the  head.  But  suppose  she  went  up-stairs  and  roused 
somebody — raised  an  alarm  that  proved  false?  That  situa 
tion  would  be  completely  intolerable.  The  person  in  the 
library  might  well  enough  be  some  member  of  the  family 
doing  something  entirely  within  his  rights.  What  would  all 
those  big  terrible  Corbetts  think  of  her — self-confessed  little 
prowler  that  she  would  have  to  be — for  breaking  into  every 
body's  much  needed  sleep,  as  a  result  of  a  scare  she  had  got 
in  her  meddling? 

No,  she  could  not  call  anybody  until  she  had  first  made  sure 
that  the  person  in  the  library  was  really  a  burglar.  He  was 
doing  something  in  there  again.  She  heard  a  distinct  creak. 

Then  a  feasible  plan  occurred  to  her.  The  room  they  had 
put  her  in  was  on  the  second  floor.  It  was  not  one  of  the 
regular  guest-rooms,  but  a  make-shift  affair,  very  incompletely 
cleared  out  as  to  closets,  bureau-drawers  and  so  on,  to  make 
room  for  her  things.  In  the  bottom  drawer  of  a  chest  in  a 
closet  she  had  found,  during  her  first  day's  unpacking,  an 
old-fashioned  army  revolver;  had  broken  it  open,  automat 
ically,  noted  that  it  was  loaded,  closed  the  breech  again  and 
put  it  back  without  thinking  much  about  it,  except  that  the 
sight  of  it  had  given  her  a  momentary  pang  of  homesickness. 

Now,  however,  the  recollection  of  it  afforded  the  solution 
for  her  problem.  It  would  be  silly,  of  course,  to  walk  right 
in  upon  a  burglar,  as  she  was.  But  armed  with  a  weapon 
she  was  fairly  skilful  in  the  use  of,  she  could  go  into  that 


22  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

library  and  make  sure  whether  the  person  in  there  was  a 
burglar  or  not.  If  he  was,  she  would  go  and  call  somebody. 
She  had  no  notion  of  trying  to  capture  him  herself.  The  re 
volver  was  merely  precautionary. 

AVith  the  maximum  of  speed  consistent  with  silence,  she 
flew  up  to  her  room,  armed  herself,  and  then  came  down 
again,  not  frightened  at  all,  and  fortified  by  the  confidence 
that  she  was  doing  the  right  thing. 

There  was  a  bright  light  burning  in  the  library  now,  which 
simplified  the  situation  still  further.  One  glance  would  tell 
her  whether  he  was  some  one  who  had  a  right  to  be  there  or 
not.  The  fact  that  he  had  turned  on  the  light  made  it  seem 
a  little  more  likely  to  her  that  he  was. 

She  had  supposed  that  the  safe  was  down  at  the  far  end 
of  the  room,  behind  an  oak  door  which  looked  as  if  it  opened 
into  an  ordinary  cupboard.  And  it  was  there,  as  she  stole  up 
to  the  doorway,  that  her  gaze  went  first.  The  cupboard  door 
stood  open,  but  it  was  a  cupboard  door.  There  was  no  safe 
behind  it.  The  same  glance  told  her  that  a  window  at  that 
end  of  the  room  was  open,  too. 

She  took  one  step  into  the  room.  A  board  creaked  and  a 
man,  in  the  near  corner  of  the  room,  sprang  up  and  faced  her. 

"Stand  perfectly  still,"  she  said,  and  brought  the  revolver 
around  in  front  of  her. 

He  was  a  burglar  fast  enough,  although  he  did  not  look 
like  those  of  her  dreams.  He  was  thin  and  shabby.  He  wore 
a  derby  hat,  and  his  mouth  was  shaded  by  a  drooping,  rather 
scraggy  mustache. 

His  eyes  told  her  that  he  did  not  mean  to  obey  her  injunc 
tion  to  stand  still  and  she  fired  the  revolver  just  as  he  was 
getting  set  for  a  jump. 

"Never  point  a  revolver  at  a  man's  head/'  her  father  had 
instructed  her  at  once,  "unless  you  are  really  willing  to  kill 
him.  It's  much  better  to  fire  at  his  feet.  That  will  convince 
almost  anybody  that  you  mean  business,  and  without  fatal 
results." 

Jean  had  obeyed  instructions.    "If  you  start  to  move  again/' 


THE    HOUSE  23 

she  said  very  steadily  and  distinctly,  "I'll  shoot  at  your 
legs." 

But  she  was  not  obliged  to  carry  out  the  threat.  The  one 
shot  she  fired  had  served  the  double  purpose  of  convincing  the 
burglar  that  she  meant  business  and — no  wonder,  for  it  made 
a  noise  like  a  cannon — of  rousing  the  house. 

Carter  was  the  first  one  down.  He  had  been  lying  awake, 
it  seemed  (the  provocative  indifference  of  one  of  the  brides 
maids  was  responsible  for  this),  and  he  undoubtedly  broke 
all  previous  records  for  speed  from  the  third  story  of  that 
house  to  the  first.  He  hadn't  stopped  for  bathrobe  or  slippers 
and,  arriving  barefooted  and  in  pajamas,  ready  for  any  dan 
gerous  deed  that  might  be  demanded  of  him,  he  couldn't  be 
blamed  for  feeling,  after  the  first  astonishment,  both  scandal 
ized  and  aggrieved  that  the  little  playmate  his  mother  had 
picked  out  for  him  had  beaten  him  to  it  like  that.  He  made 
handsome  amends  afterward,  to  be  sure:  complimented  her 
pluck  the  next  day,  in  terms  that  would  have  turned  any 
Yale  underclassman  into  an  insufferable  monument  of  pride. 

To  his  first  rather  inarticulate  inquiry,  she  had  said  simply 
that  it  was  a  burglar.  "I  had  to  fire,"  she  explained,  <fbe- 
cause  he  wouldn't  stand  still."  And  she  continued  to  hold 
the  gun  pointed  steadily  at  the  man's  legs. 

Before  he  eould  think  of  anything  to  do  but  stare  at  the 
litter  of  burglarious  tools  about  the  safe-door,  at  the  man 
himself,  and  at  the  small  hole  in  the  floor  at  hie  feet,  Hugh 
came  in  and  embittered  his  brother  still  further  by  doing 
instantly,  and  without  a  word,  the  right  thing.  He  slipped 
a  supporting  arm  around  the  girl,  and  took  the  revolver  away 
from  her  with  his  other  hand  without  deflecting  it  from 
the  quarry. 

"All  right?"  he  asked  her.  "Yon  did  a  good  job.  Xow 
go  out  to  mother.  She's  on  her  way  down-stairs."  Then  to 
Carter,  "Go  and  tell  everybody  it's  all  right.  Nothings  hap 
pened.  And  tell  Greg  and  Bob  to  come  down  here.  Keep 
the  rest  away  if  you  can." 

But  these  instructions  came  too  late.    There  were  between 


?M  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

thirty  and  forty  people  in  that  house  and  while  not  many 
of  them  had  actually  heard  the  shot  fired,  they  were  all  roused 
within  a  minute  or  two  by  the  collateral  noises — slamming 
of  doors,  scurry  of  feet,  questions  and  answers  in  suppressed 
but  penetrating  voices — to  an  awareness  that  something  in 
need  of  investigation  had  happened.  And  they  came  troop 
ing  down  to  investigate. 

Jean,  beginning  to  tell  her  story  to  Mrs.  'Corbett  (she  had 
on  again  that  astounding  dressing-gown  of  red  and  yellow 
tulips)  could  not  complete  her  recital  at  all.  She  was  always 
having  to  go  back  to  the  beginning  to  answer  the  feverish 
question  of  some  new  arrival. 

It  was  all  chaos  for  a  while,  and  rendered  the  more  dis 
tracting  by  an  insistent  ringing  of  bells,  which  was  found, 
on  investigation,  to  be  the  night-watchman  in  the  yard  trying 
vainly  at  one  door  after  another  to  get  in. 

But  presently,  out  of  the  babble,  the  crowding  up  for  a  look, 
the  panic-stricken  disappearance  of  persons  who  realized  some 
fundamental  lack  in  their  attire,  there  emerged  a  sort  of  com 
mon  sense  of  a  contretemps.  It  came  over  Jean  when  she 
heard  Anne  wail : 

"Oh,  why  did  they  have  to  catch  him  ?  It  makes  just  one 
more  disgusting  chance  for  the  newspapers/5 

With  the  crystallization  of  this  idea — that  here  was  a  situa 
tion  for  tact,  reticence,  polite  ignorance,  if  necessary  the 
gtout  assertion  that  nothing  had  happened  at  all — there  came 
a  swift  dispersal  of  guests  and  a  peremptory  dismissal  of  serv 
ants  to  their  own  quarters. 

Jean,  feeling  by  now  terribly  guilty,  lingered  a  while  to 
learn  whether  her  testimony  was  going  to  be  wanted.  But, 
finding  it  was  not,  she  presently  stole  away  after  the  others. 

Only,  it  was  characteristic  of  her  that  she  managed  to  slip 
into  the  billiard-room  first  and  recover  her  treasured  place- 
card  from  between  the  cushions  of  the  settee. 


CHAPTER  II 

JEAN,  with  a  child's  clairvoyance,,  had  made  a  discovery 
about  the  Corbetts  that  they  were  hardly  aware  of  them 
selves;  namely,  that  Hugh  was  the  different  one.  Any 
one  intimate  with  the  clan  and  indiscreet  enough  to  gossip 
about  them,  would  tell  you  at  once  that  the  black  sheep  among 
Robert  Corbett's  children,  was  Robert,  Junior.  He  was  the 
one  who  had  got  into  boyish  scrapes;  been  sent  to  military 
school;  had  needed  all  the  family  influence  to  pull  him  out 
of  a  really  bad  mess  his  senior  year  in  college,  and,  at  twenty- 
five,  the  year  before  Anne's  wedding,  had  been  put  in  nominal 
charge  of  his  father's  ranch  as,  upon  the  whole,  the  safest 
place  for  him. 

But  down  inside,  Robert,  Junior,  was  as  orthodox  as  any 
body.  In  a  sense  his  misdemeanors  were  accidental.  His 
notion  of  what  desirable  conduct  was,  in  any  set  of  circum 
stances,  would  have  agreed  perfectly  with  Gregory's. 

The  real  black  sheep  of  the  family,  the  genuinely  odd  one, 
v:as  Hugh.  He  saw  things,  somehow,  at  a  different  slant; 
began  at  ten  years  old  questioning  things  the  others  found  un 
questionable.  The  thing  that  saved  him  from  being  a  rebel 
was  his  sense  of  humor.  His  college  career  is  a  good  illustra 
tion  of  tliis. 

Gregory,  two  and  a  half  years  older,  and  a  senior  when 
Hugh  entered  as  a  freshman,  was  one  of  the  college  demigods 
— already  a  myth.  This  was  not  only  because  he  was  "the 
greatest  guard  who  had  ever  worn  the  blue,"  but  because, 
in  all  other  matters  of  conduct,  he  conformed  perfectly  to  the 
standardized  ideal.  He  did  all  the  things  a  chap  was  ex 
pected  to  do,  and  did  them  as  well  as  it  was  permissible  to 
do  them.  He  was  solemn  when  solemnity  was  appropriate; 
flippant  about  the  things  one  was  supposed  to  treat  light- 

26 


26  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

heartedly.  And  all  quite  honestly  and  without  affectation. 
Even  the  extravagant  homage  and  awe  which  he  inspired 
in  underclassmen  he  took  with  the  precise  degree  of  serious 
good-humor  which  the  exactness  of  college  etiquette  required. 

Hugh,  coming  along  behind  him,  with  the  same  magnifi 
cent  physique,  the  coordinations,  the  same  breeding  and  tra 
dition  that  ought  to  have  made  him  the  unquestioned  heir 
to  his  brother's  mantle,  found  it  difficult  to  swim  with  the 
current.  The  thing  his  brother  called  "loyalty  to  Yale" — 
that  cardinal  virtue  which  must  be  the  corner-stone  of  his 
edifice,  the  master  passion  of  his  life,  he  simply  could  not 
feel.  When  he  saw  a  middle-aged  alumnus,  red-faced,  wet- 
eyed,  voiceless  with  cheering,  at  the  end  of  a  football  game, 
he  experienced  the  profane  impulse  to  ask  him  why  he  felt 
like  that,  and  if  he  really  did. 

In  his  sophomore  year,  there  was  a  nice  old  gentleman  who 
was  brought  in  to  address  the  team  just  before  they  went  out 
into  the  field  for  one  of  their  big  games  (these  harangues 
were  a  specialty  of  his,  it  seemed)  and  the  things  he  said 
gave  Hugh  the  uneasy,  abashed  feeling  one  has  over  any 
solemn  absurdity.  He  didn't  quite  know  where  to  look. 
Addressed  to  soldiers  on  the  point  of  giving  their  lives  to 
protect  their  homes  against  an  invading  army,  it  might  have 
been  admissible.  But  he  was  talking  to  boys  about  to  play  a 
game.  Yet  to  the  others,  Hugh  could  see,  the  occasion  was 
a  sacrament. 

Hugh  made  the  team  three  of  his  four  years  and,  upon 
the  whole,  an  athletic  record  which,  had  he  not  been  Gregory's 
j^ounger  brother,  would  have  been  highly  creditable.  But, 
as  Gregory's  brother,  he  was  a  disappointment. 

And  the  same  thing  was  true  of  other  things  than  athletics. 
With  the  score  of  byways  attracting  him,  he  found  the  mid 
dle  of  the  road — the  constant  doing  of  the  things  so  relent 
lessly  marked  out  for  him  to  do,  the  exclusive  association  with 
the  sort  of  men,  and  the  exclusive  occupation  with  the  sort 
of  interests,  that  tradition  indicated  for  him — a  rather  arid 
and  unprofitable  thing. 

Sometimes  he  did  take  to  a  byway.    Music  was  one  of  them. 


THE    HOUSE  27 

Xot  the  mandolin  and  glee-club  sort  of  music,  but  the  real 
thing.  He  elected  two  courses  under  Horatio  Parker  and 
worked  away  at  them  to  the  scandal  of  his  right-minded 
friends.  And,  toward  the  end,  when  he  uncovered  a  real 
passion  for  metallurgy,  he  pursued  it,  to  the  neglect  of  serious 
athletic  and  social  duties.  But  he  never  came  out  in  flat  re 
bellion  against  the  code,  and  that  he  did  not  do  so,  was  due, 
as  I  have  said,  to  his  possession  of  a  sense  of  humor — to  his 
ability  (it  has  wrecked  many  a  good  man)  to  make  an  in 
visible  smile  serve  him  as  the  substitute  for  a  protest. 

In  the  main  he  did  the  conventional  thing  when  the  con 
ventional  thing  was  there  to  do.  It  was  the  unprecedented 
situations  that  he  met  in  unprecedented  ways.  Which  takea 
us  back  to  the  burglar. 

When  the  first  confusion  had  subsided  and  guests  and 
servants  had  gone  back  to  bed,  the  family  settled  down,  in 
the  billiard-room,  to  wrestle  with  the  situation.  They  were 
not  all  there.  Hugh  was  still  guarding  the  burglar  over  in 
the  library  across  the  hall.  Constance  had  made  only  a 
momentary  appearance  and  then  gone  back  to  bed.  Grand 
father — luckily,  they  all  agreed — had  evidently  slept  right 
through  the  whole  row.  Because,  if  he  had  come  down,  as 
he  would  surely  have  done  had  he  known  that  anything  was 
going  on,  he  would  have  settled  what  was  to  be  done  in  one 
breath;  only  not  necessarily  to  any  one's  satisfaction  but  his 
own,  and  certainly  not  to  every  one's. 

Will  you  stop  just  a  moment  for  a  look  at  them  at  the  end 
of  a  half -hour's  dispute? 

Robert  Corbett,  Senior,  stands  before  the  empty  fireplace, 
his  elbow  on  the  mantel  shelf.  He  would  pass  for  a  big  man 
almost  anywhere  save  at  his  own  hearth ;  here,  with  his  family 
around  him,  his  bare  six  feet  of  height  conveys  almost  the 
contrary  impression.  He  looks  now,  as  always,  exactly  as 
a  man  of  his  age,  social  position  and  financial  importance, 
ought  to  look.  He  wears  a  long  dressing-gown  of  a  severely 
neutral  brown-gray.  He  has  on  socks  as  well  as  slippers ;  and 
if  he  did  not  stop  to  brush  hi?  thick,  close-trimmed  gray  hair 
before  he  came  down-stairs,  then  it  is  because  his  slumbers 


2S  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

had  not  disarranged  it.  He  wears  eye-glasses  and  mustache. 
Conventionally  he  is  handsomer  than  any  of  his  boys,  ex 
cepting,  perhaps,  Carter.  In  a  word,  his  appearance  as  defi 
nitely  soothes  the  eye  as  his  wife's  outrages  it. 

You  have  already  seen  her,  as  Jean  did  on  an  earlier  occa 
sion,  and  she  looks  now  much  as  she  did  then.  She  sits  very 
square  at  one  end  of  the  big  settee.  She  is  smoking  one  of 
Robert,  Junior's,  cigarettes  and  grimacing  over  it  because  it 
is  not  the  kind  she  likes.  Robert's  cigarettes,  it  may  be 
noted,  have  his  own  monogram  on  them  and  cost  him  thirty 
dollars  a  thousand.  His  mother's  are  the  sort  you  get  twenty 
of  for  a  dime  and  the  red  label  on  the  package  has  the  pic 
ture  of  a  ball-player  on  it. 

Gregory  is  at  the  other  end  of  the  settee  in  an  attitude 
that  duplicates  his  mother's — arms  folded,  legs  crossed,  shoul 
ders  back  and  head  bent  slightly  forward.  His  jaws  are 
clamped  hard  on  the  short  stem  of  a  pipe,  his  lips  parted 
just  enough  to  permit  a  thin  ribbon  of  smoke  to  float  out 
and  up  into  his  nostrils  again  whenever  he  breathes  in. 

Robert,  in  giddily  striped  blue  and  orange  pajamas,  half 
sits  upon  the  rail  of  the  billiard  table,  one  shin  in  the  em 
brace  of  both  arms,  his  other  foot  on  the  floor,  absently 
watching  Carter,  who  incessantly  spins  a  cue-ball,  with  vary 
ing  amounts  of  English  and  at  different  angles,  about  the 
cushions. 

Anne,  looking  almost  petite  from  the  scale  established  by 
the  others,  outraged,  determined,  upon  the  brink  of  tears, 
rather  indecent  in  her  disregarded  dressing-gown,  and  ex 
travagantly  pretty,  has  flung  herself  with  abandon,  into  a 
big  armchair.  In  her,  the  contest  between  the  sandy  san 
guine  color  of  the  Corbetts  and  her  mother's  black  and 
white,  has  effected  the  highly  felicitous  compromise  of  auburn 
hair  and  a  milk-white  skin.  It's  a  pity  that  she  can't  be 
painted  exactly  as  she  sits,  though  such  a  portrait  would 
not  be  one  that  her  decorous  husband-to-be  would  care  to 
hang  upon  his  ancestral  walls. 

"Well,"  she  said  with  a  self-contradictory  emphasis,  "I 
don't  care  what  you  do/'  She  sprang  to  her  feet  and  with 


THE    HOUSE  29 

a  flash  of  tragic  dignity,  drew  her  forgotten  gown  around 
her  and  turned  upon  her  father.  "Only  it  really  seems,  when 
you  think  of  the  perfectly  horrid  provincial  way  the  papers 
are  acting  about  my  wedding — and  it  really  is  mine,  I  sup 
pose — the  silly  impertinent  things  they've  said  about  Doug 
las  and  his  friends  and  the  vulgar  things  they've  made  up 
about  the  presents  and  everything,  it  really  does  seem  that 
we  might  draw  the  line  at  a  burglar.  It's  bad  enough  what 
the  Duncans  will  think  already.  But  if  this  comes  out,  they'll 
think  they're  in  a  mining  town.  I  don't  care  what  you  do 
with  him/'  she  summarized  with  a  nod  in  the  direction  of 
the  library,  "only  I  won't  have  anything  done  that  the  re 
porters  will  find  out  about." 

It  was  evident  that  her  father  was  inclined  to  agree  with 
her.  The  notion  of  what  the  head-lines  across  the  vari-colored 
pages  of  the  afternoon  papers  would  be  like,  if  the  story  got 
out,  was  as  intolerable  to  his  contemplation  as  it  was  to  hers. 

He  started  to  speak  but  was  interrupted  by  a  sepulchral 
whisper  of  his  wife's.  "Wall  him  up  in  the  cellar.  There  you 
are !"  And  she  grinned  through  a  copious  exhalation  of 
smoke. 

"There's  no  use  trying  to  do  the  thing  half-way,"  Robert, 
Junior,  said,  ignoring,  as  the  rest  of  them  did,  his  mother's 
medieval  suggestion.  "Invite  him  to  the  front  door  and 
kick  him  down  the  steps.  Give  his  bag  of  tools  to  Carter 
here,  for  a  souvenir,  and  forget  about  him.  I'm  for  that,  on 
the  whole." 

Carter  brightened  up  at  that,  and  stopped  playing  with  his 
billiard  ball  long  enough  to  cast  his  affirmative  vote  with  a 
nod.  Anne,  scenting  victory,  went  over  appealingly  to  her 
father  and  slid  her  arm  around  him. 

"You're  for  it,  too,  aren't  you,  dad  ?"  she  asked. 

"I  can't  see,"  he  said  (this  negative  way  of  putting  it  was 
characteristic  of  him),  "that  we're  under  any  obligation  to 
subject  ourselves  to  any  more  publicity.  It  is  odious ;  Anne's 
right  about  that.  And,  as  Eobert  says,  half-way  measures 
will  only  make  it  worse.  I  don't  know  but  his  suggestion  is 
the  best  we  have  had." 


30  AN   AMEBICAN   FAMILY 

It  was  a  clear  majority  for  Anne,  if  one  counted  heads. 
But  the  Corbett  family  was  not  a  democracy.  The  two  who 
had  not  yet  spoken,  could  out-vote  the  other  four. 

Gregory  said,  "We're  not  criminals.  And  what  you're  talk 
ing  about  doing's  a  crime.  The  man's  an  expert  house 
breaker.  We  don't  know  that  he  hasn't  robbed  other  houses 
to-night,  or  that  he  wouldn't  go  from  here,  if  we  turned  him 
loose,  and  do  another  job  down  the  street,  before  breakfast. 
And,  if  he  did,  it  would  be  our  crime  almost  as  much  as  his. 
I'm  sorry  he  didn't  get  away  from  Jean,  even  if  it  had  meant 
his  cleaning  out  the  safe.  But  now  that  we've  got  him  .  .  ." 

In  despair,  Anne  attempted  casuistry.  "Why,  he  isn't  a 
burglar  at  all,"  she  said.  "He  didn't  get  anything,  did  he? 
I  don't  believe  we've  any  right  to  keep  him." 

Gregory  grinned  and  went  on.  "But,  having  got  him, 
there's  nothing  for  it  but  to  see  it  through." 

Mrs.  Corbett  yawned,  stretched,  and  began  to  get  ready 
to  get  up.  "Oh,  it's  all  a  tempest  in  a  teapot,"  she  said. 
"The  papers  have  always  gone  on  about  us  and  they  always 
will.  And  if  you  don't  like  it,  you'd  better  learn  to,  as  your 
grandfather  says  he  used  to  be  told  about  eating  with  a  fork.  I 
do,  for  a  fact.  They're  amusing  little  beggars,  reporters — as 
long  as  you  don't  read  what  they  say.  Anyhow,  Gregory's  right, 
unless  you  want  to  do  as  I  said — wall  him  up  in  one  of  the 
chimneys." 

Her  grim  good-humor  gave  way  at  sight  of  her  daughter's 
gesture  of  despair.  "Come,  Anne,  don't  be  a  little  fool.  Your 
Duncans  won't  die  of  it." 

The  next  moment,  looking  not  at  her  daughter,  but  to  the 
doorway  beyond  her,  she  boomed  out,  "AVhat  the  devil  .  .  . !" 
And,  as  they  all  followed  her  gaze,  Hugh  walked  into  the 
room  and  dropped  down  on  the  settee  between  her  and 
Gregory. 

They  all,  in  a  variety  of  phrases,  demanded  to  be  told  what 
had  become  of  the  burglar. 

"Asleep,"  said  Hugh. 

"Well,"  Robert,  Junior,  observed,  tentatively  straightening 


THE    HOUSE  31 

out  his  bent  leg,  "that  settles  the  argument.  He'll  have  gone 
by  now.  Did  he  really  put  it  over  on  you  ?  Or  did  you  wink 
the  other  eye?" 

"Not  a  bit  of  either/'  said  Hugh  shortly.  "He's  really 
asleep.  If  you'll  keep  still  a  minute,  you  can  hear  him 
snore/' 

"How  did  you  do  it?"  Carter  wanted  to  know  after  an 
instant  of  confirmatory  silence.  "Hit  him  ?" 

"The  effect  of  food,  I  guess,"  said  Hugh.    "He  was  all  in." 

"Food  ?"  his  mother  echoed.    "What  did  you  feed  him  for  ?" 

"Why,  I  felt  hungry  myself,"  Hugh  explained,  "so  I  flagged 
Price  going  by  and  told  him  to  bring  up  some  sandwiches 
and  beer.  I  saw  the  poor  devil  looking  at  them  like  a  wolf, 
so  naturally  I  asked  him  if  he  was  hungry.  He  was,  all 
right.  He  ate  all  the  sandwiches  except  the  one  I'd  begun  on, 
and  I  sent  Price  after  more  beer.  We  chinned  a  while  and  he 
went  off  to  sleep." 

"He  told  you  the  story  of  his  life,  I  suppose,"  Gregory 
put  in.  "All  about  how  it  wasn't  his  fault  and  all  he  needed 
was  a  chance — the  regular  hard-luck  tale." 

Hugh  nodded.  "Yes,  he  told  me.  Naturally,  since  I'd 
asked  him.  One  of  the  points  of  the  hard-luck  tale  is  that 
he  worked  for  us — tool-maker;  quit  about  a  year  ago  because 
his  wages  were  garnisheed." 

There  was  another  silence  at  that.  Anne,  with  a  gleam  of 
hope,  turned  again  to  her  father. 

"WTiy,  really,"  he  said,  "I'm  not  sure  that  these  circum 
stances  don't  put  a  new  face  upon  the  matter.  If  the  man 
was  desperate — starving — an  old  employee — and  a  first  of 
fense  .  .  ." 

"Oh,  come,  father,"  Gregory  expostulated.  "There's  his 
kit.  The  fact  that  he  was  working  on  the  safe  .  .  ." 

"Yes,"  said  Bob,  going  over  to  the  enemy,  "they  make 
hash  of  that  theory." 

"He's  an  expert  burglar,"  Hugh  testified.  "He  takes  a 
sort  of  pride  in  it.  Says  he  learned  the  trade  under  one  of 
the  most  expert  men  in  the  country — a  chap  who's  doing 


33  AN   AMERICAN"    FAMILY 

fourteen  years  in  Auburn  now  for  a  bank  job."  He  paused 
a  moment.  Then,  "Do  you  care  for  the  rest  of  the  story?" 
he  asked. 

The  inflection  of  his  voice  was  casual  enough,  and  on  the 
question  he  lounged  to  his  feet  and  reached  for  one  of  Rob 
ert's  cigarettes.  But  his  mother,  looking  up  sharply  at  him, 
noticed  that  he  did  not  light  it  nor  sit  down  again  beside  her. 
He  began  telling  the  story  stiffly,  as  if  by  rote. 

"He  was  sent  to  the  house  of  correction  when  he  was  six 
teen.  Rightly  enough,  he  admits.  He'd  been  running  with 
a  gang  who  were  breaking  into  freight  cars.  When  he  came 
out,  he  hadn't  any  idea  but  to  be  a  regular  criminal.  Through 
one  of  the  friends  he  had  made  there,  he  got  acquainted  with 
this  expert  safe-cracker;  worked  with  him  for  three  or  four 
years.  And  then  they  both  got  caught.  He  drew  a  fairly 
light  sentence  because  he  looked  like  a  kid. 

"He'd  already  made  up  his  mind  to  quit — was  doing  his 
last  job,  he  says,  when  they  caught  him — on  account  of  a 
girl  he'd  fallen  in  love  with.  She  stuck,  and  when  he  canio 
out,  she  married  him.  He  says  he's  run  straight  ever  since, 
till  to-night.  They've  got  three  children.  Got  on  well — hap 
pily  anyhow — for  several  years.  And  then  his  wife  got  sick; 
the  doctors  bled  them  dry,  and  at  last  she  went  to  the  hos 
pital;  was  there  six  months.  Had  to  have  a  couple  of  opera 
tions.  He  got  an  infected  hand  and  couldn't  work.  Things 
began  happening  to  the  children.  He  had  to  go  to  the  loan 
sharks  .  .  .  That  finished  him,  of  course. 

"It  was  the  stuff  in  the  papers  about  this  wedding  that 
finally  got  him.  And  he  figured  there  was  a  chance  for  a 
really  big  haul  with  all  the  jewelry  there  must  be,  so  he  had 
a  shot  at  it.  That's  the  story." 

The  timbre  in  his  voice  which  had  caught  his  mother's  ear 
at  the  beginning  of  the  recital,  had  its  effect  on  them  all  be 
fore  he  finished.  Half-way  through,  Carter  had  stopped  spin 
ning  his  billiard  ball,  and  at  the  end  he  won  an  instant  of 
clear  silence.  Anne  came  over  beside  him,  honestly  a  little 
moved  by  the  story,  though  at  the  same  time,  of  course,  glad 
to  be.  She  picked  up  his  hand  and  laid  her  cheek  against  it. 


THE   HOUSK  33 

"Really,  that's  shocking !"  his  father  said. 

"Oh,  it's  a  good  story/'  Gregory  admitted,  "if  it's  true." 

"A  bit  too  good  to  be  true,  I'd  say,"  Bob  put  in. 

Hugh  took  his  hand  away  from  his  sister  and  straightened 
a  little.  "It  will  be  easy  to  find  out  if  it's  true/'  he  said 
shortly. 

"It  makes  mighty  little  odds  whether  it's  true  or  not,  ac 
cording  to  my  way  of  thinking,"  his  mother  said.  "This 
sentimental  nonsense  makes  me  sick."  One  might  have  haz 
arded  the  guess  that  the  purpose  of  her  words  was  deliberately 
provocative.  "I've  a  good  strong  stomach,  but  it  turns  over 
when  I  hear  people  whimpering  that  they'd  have  been  good 
if  they'd  had  a  chance.  Nobody  who  was  any  good  ever 
turned  house-breaker.  If  that  man  in  there  had  the  gumption 
to  say,  'All  right.  I'll  take  my  medicine.  I'm  responsible 
and  nobody  else  is/  I'd  feel  like  going  in  and  shaking  hands 
with  him." 

"If  he  said  that,  he'd  be  a  liar/'  said  Hugh.  "We're  re 
sponsible  if  you  want  it  straight." 

That  drew  an  exclamation  of  protest  from  everybody,  ex 
cept  his  mother,  to  whom  it  was  addressed.  She  leaned  back 
again,  crossed  her  legs  the  other  way,  and  grinned. 

"Of  course  we  are,"  he  went  on.  "If  there  was  a  spark 
of  decent  humanity  about  our  place  out  there,  it  wouldn't 
have  happened." 

"Well,  that  turns  my  stomach,"  said  Gregory.  He  got  up 
and  marched  over  to  the  station  at  the  fireplace  his  father 
had  abandoned.  "I'm  an  inhuman  monster,  am  I,  because 
a  tool-maker's  wife  gets  something  the  matter  with  her  and 
has  to  go  to  the  hospital  ?" 

"I  didn't  say  you*  I  said  we"  Hugh  retorted,  "meaning 
the  whole  organization  of  the  plant.  Down  at  Panama, 
which  is  the  only  place  where  a  big  industrial  job  has  ever 
been  done  right,  they'd  have  taken  his  wife  to  the  hospital 
as  soon  as  she  got  sick,  and  the  operations  and  the  nursing 
wouldn't  have  cost  him  a  cent.  But,  of  course,  what  I  meant 
was,  that  in  the  whole  situation,  we'd  have  stepped  in  some 
where.  If  we  had  sick  and  accident  insurance,  and  a  medical 


34  AN   AMBEICAN    FAMILY 

inspection  at  the  plant  itself,  we'd  have  caught  his  infected 
hand.  And  if  we  had  some  sort  of  an  emergency  loan  fund, 
we'd  have  saved  him  from  the  sharks.  We  wouldn't  let  a  valu 
able  piece  of  machinery  out  there  start  a  bolt  or  two  and  go  on 
and  thrash  itself  to  junk  before  we  did  anything.  That's  what 
we  let  him  do." 

"Does  anybody  know  what  time  it  is?"  Robert,  Junior, 
wanted  to  know.  He  lounged  over  to  the  windows  and  ran 
up  the  blinds.  It  was  full  day  out-of-doors.  "If  we  could 
get  the  practical  details  arranged  first,"  he  continued,  through 
a  yawn,  "then  anybody  that  liked  could  stay  and  hear  Hugh 
discuss  sociology." 

"There's  nothing  to  discuss,"  said  Hugh.  "And  the  prac 
tical  details  are  arranged.  I  fixed  it  all  up  with  him  before 
he  went  to  sleep.  As  soon  as  it  gets  late  enough — seven 
o'clock  or  so — I'm  going  out  with  him  and  check  up  on  his 
story;  talk  to  his  wife;  talk  to  the  parish  priest  out  there; 
go  over  to  the  plant  and  see  the  superintendent.  If  his 
story's  true,  I  promised  him  we'd  see  him  through.  He 
dropped  off  like  a  tired  kid,  when  I  told  him  that." 

"Just  what  do  you  mean  by  seeing  him  through  ?"  Gregory 
wanted  to  know. 

Hugh  admitted  that  he  hadn't  worked  out  all  the  details. 
He  supposed  he'd  have  to  go  round  to  police  headquarters  to 
find  out  if  he  was  wanted  for  anything  else,  and  then  to 
some  judge  and  get  him  paroled.  "Of  course,  to  one  of  us," 
he  concluded. 

Anne's  wail,  "Then  it  will  get  into  the  papers  after  all," 
was  the  prelude  to  a  confusion  that  there  is  no  use  attempting 
to  chronicle.  Hugh's  plan  of  action,  combining,  as  it  did, 
all  the  objections  to  all  the  plans  that  had  hitherto  been  sug 
gested,  united  the  two  camps  and  they  all  tried  to  attack  him 
at  once. 

But  it  would  have  taken  a  more  genuine  unanimity  than 
they  had,  to  effect  anything  with  Hugh  in  his  present  mood. 
He  had  taken,  as  he  did  sometimes,  the  bit  in  his  teeth  and 
they  came,  one  after  another,  to  realize  this. 

"I'll  try  not  to  mess  up  Anne's  wedding,"  he  said  at  last, 


THE    HOUSE  35 

"at  least  to  the  extent  of  making  it  illegal.  But  for  the  rest 
of  it,  I  don't  give  a  damn.  I've  told  that  chap  in  there  what 
I'd  do,  and  I'm  going  to  do  it.  So  I  don't  see  that  there's 
anything  more  to  be  said.  I'll  take  the  whole  thing  up  with 
grandfather,  of  course,  later  in  the  day." 

One  by  one  the  others  gave  him  up  and  drifted  back  to 
bod,  leaving  Hugh  to  keep  a  guard — which  he  felt  pretty  sure 
was  superfluous — over  the  prisoner.  The  last  one  to  go  was 
his  father,  who  plainly  had  lingered  for  a  word  alone  with 
him. 

"I  must  admit,"  Robert,  Senior,  said,  "that  your  criticism 
of  our  organization  there  at  the  plant  is,  in  the  main,  just. 
It's  a  thing  I've  felt  and  wanted  to  see  corrected  for  many 
years.  But  I've  never  been  able  to  induce  your  grandfather 
even  to  consider  it  seriously.  Some  day,  of  course,  it  will 
not  be  so  impossible.  I'm — I'm  really  very  glad  to  know 
that  you  feel  as  you  do  about  it."  And  then,  "Get  back  for 
Anne's  rehearsal  at  the  church,  if  you  can,  my  boy.  And 
if  it's  possible  to  avoid  the  reporters  .  .  ." 


CHAPTER  III 

A'~TE  CORBETT'S  wedding  went  off  very  well.  The 
brilliant  cluster  of  social  events,  of  which  it  was  the 
nucleus,  made  their  meteoric  transit  unsullied  by  any 
lurid  reclame  concerning  the  burglar.  There  was  not  a  word 
of  that  night's  adventure  in  any  newspaper;  there  was  hardly 
any  gossip.  The  thing  turned  out  to  have  been,  as  Mrs.  Cor- 
bett  said,  a  tempest  in  a  teapot. 

Little  Jean  Gilbert  was,  of  course,  wholly  forgiven.  They 
even  made  a  bit  of  a  heroine  of  her,  and  would  have  gone 
further  with  this  had  not  her  secret  made  her  reticent  about 
the  whole  affair.  She  was  asked,  to  be  sure,  what  she  had  been 
doing  at  the  library  door  at  three  o'clock  in  the  morning, 
but  her  great  dignity  and  her  uncontrollable  bright  blush, 
in  answering  that  she  had  been  looking  for  something  of 
hers  that  she  had  lost,  let  her  off  further  inquisition. 

She  made  a  highly  satisfactory  bridesmaid  and  was  carried 
off,  immediately  afterward,  a  little  slack  and  dreamy  with 
happiness  and  fatigue,  by  her  Aunt  Constance  to  Lake  Forest, 
where  she  spent  the  summer  learning  golf  and  French,  driving 
the  run-about,  playing  with  Constance's  babies,  getting  ready 
for  school  in  the  autumn;  doing,  in  a  word,  all  the  things  a 
girl  of  sixteen  and  a  half  can  profitably  be  occupied  with. 
In  the  process  of  doing  these  things  she  achieved  the  con 
quest  of  old  Mrs.  Crawford,  her  grandmother.  And  she 
dreamed  delightfully,  when  she  did  not  fall  too  soundly 
asleep  too  soon,  about  Hugh  Corbett. 

What  she  did  not  dream — what  the  wildest  cast  of  her  net 
of  romance  never  brought  up — was  that  that  nocturnal  ad 
venture  of  hers,  her  search  for  the  place-card  with  some  of 
his  handwriting  on  it  and  the  burglar  she  caught  as  a  result, 


THE    HOUSE  37 

n uide  a  critical  change  in  Hugh's  life;  constituted  a  new 
point  of  departure  for  him. 

This  is  primarily  Hugh  Corbett's  story.  The  capture  of 
the  burglar  is  not  the  beginning  of  it,  of  course.  A  man's 
story  has  no  beginning,  nor,  for  that  matter,  any  end  either. 
But  looking  along  the  thread  for  a  point  where  I  could  pick 
up  this  chronicle,  that  seemed  a  good  place  to  choose. 

Tor  him  this  teapot  tempest  turned  out  to  have  important 
results — results  totally  incommensurate  with  its  own  insig 
nificance. 

There  were  as  many  anomalies  in  the  Corbett  domestic 
establishment  as  there  are  in  the  British  Constitution.  And 
the  chief  of  them  was  Hannah.  Forty  years  ago,  or  such  a 
matter,  she  had  gone  to  work  as  kitchen-maid  for  old  Gregory 
and  his  wife.  It  would  be  impossible  to  say  what  she  was 
now.  Housekeeper  she  might  be  called,  perhaps,  but  for 
certain  perfectly  incongruous  duties  to  which  she  still  exer 
cised  a  prescriptive  right.  She  always  waited  on  the  table, 
for  instance,  when  old  Gregory  came  down  to  breakfast; 
this  was  at  half  past  seven  in  the  winter  and  a  quarter  past 
in  the  summer.  Usually  his  eldest  grandson  and  namesake 
came  down  about  the  same  time  and  breakfasted  with  him, 
and  sometimes  before  they  had  finished,  Mrs.  Eobert,  in  her 
red-and-yellow  tulips,  or  an  equivalent  garment,  appeared. 
But  whenever  old  Gregory  left  the  table,  Hannah  followed 
him  into  the  hall,  saw  that  he  was  suitably  garbed  for  the 
weather,  and  abandoned  the  dining-room  to  more  appropriate 
attendants.  She  had  more  authority  over  him  than  any  one 
else.  There  were  some  matters  in  which  he  obeyed  her  im 
plicitly.  And  she  always  addressed  him  on  terms  of  entire 
equality.  Had  she  and  Mrs.  Robert,  her  nominal  mistress, 
ever  come  into  collision,  they  would  have  tested  the  long 
standing  argument  between  the  irresistible  force  and  the  im 
penetrable  body.  But  there  had  grown  up  between  them  a 
volume  of  precedents  comparable  to  the  Common  Law,  which 
warded  off  this  catastrophe. 

It  was  at  breakfast,  the  morning  after  the  burglary,  that 
the  old  gentleman  learned  of  it  from  Hannah.  He  had  some- 


38  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

thing  on  his  mind  to  talk  to  Gregory  about  and  at  the  end  of 
ten  minutes,  his  grandson  not  having  appeared,  he  expressed 
himself  vigorously  about  the  deficiencies  of  the  younger  gen 
eration  in  general  and  his  grandsons  in  particular.  When 
he  was  young  Gregory's  age  he  had  done  by  this  hour  in  the 
morning  what  would  pass — in  these  degenerate  times — for  a 
day's  work.  And  if  he  at  eighty-one  could  sit  down  to  break 
fast  at  a  quarter  past  seven  he'd  like  to  be  told  why  his  grand 
son  couldn't. 

Hannah  told  him.  If  Gregory  went  to  bed  at  half  past 
nine,  no  matter  what  was  going  on  in  the  house — no  matter 
if  he  had  a  granddaughter  getting  married — he'd  no  doubt 
come  down  to  breakfast  as  promptly  as  anybody. 

The  old  gentleman  had  forgotten  all  about  Anne's  wedding 
for  the  moment.  It  had  a  way  of  slipping  out  of  his  mind. 
And  to  cover  the  slip,  which  he  wouldn't  have  acknowledged 
under  any  compulsion,  he  grunted  skeptically. 

Hannah  went  on.  "And  if  he  slept  right  through  after  he'd 
gone  to  bed,  no  matter  how  many  burglars  broke  into  the 
house  .  .  ." 

"Burglars  I"  the  old  man  shouted. 

Hannah,  who  knew  quite  well  that  it  was  by  a  mere  over 
sight  she  had  not  been  instructed  not  to  tell  the  old  gentle 
man  about  the  burglar,  confided  to  him  with  gusto  some  of 
the  more  melodramatic  features  of  the  affair. 

The  result  was  that  when  young  Gregory  came  down,  not 
more  than  twenty  minutes  late  after  all,  he  stepped  into  a 
hornet's  nest. 

The  old  gentleman's  fury  was  not  quite  real.  He  enjoyed 
it,  indulged  it — played  it  up,  just  as  a  young  girl  will  in 
dulge  and  get  a  transitory  satisfaction  from  a  burst  of  tears. 
The  fact  was  that,  though  it  sounds  a  ridiculous  adjective  to 
apply  to  him,  old  Grandfather  Corbett  was  growing  frivolous. 
The  enormous  energy  that  had  driven  him  for  seventy  of 
his  years  was  pretty  well  spent.  All  it  gave  forth  now  was 
an  occasional  flare  in  place  of  the  unremitting  incandescent 
glow.  But  his  canny  Scotch  shrewdness  was  unimpaired,  and 
in  default  of  great  objects  which  asked  for  a  steady  driving 


THE    HOUSE  39 

power  he  no  longer  possessed,  this  shrewdness  concerned 
itself  largely  with  trifles.  He  was  spoilt,  of  course,  by  every 
one — but  Hannah.  Any  old,  rich,  successful  person  is  bound 
to  be.  And  in  addition  to  those  three  qualities,  Grandfather 
Corbett  had  charm;  though  there  again  is  an  adjective  one 
would  not  at  first  think  of  applying  to  him.  He  had  never 
during  his  active  life  consciously  enjoyed  the  exercise  of 
power  for  its  own  sake.  But  now  that  his  responsibilities 
were  shifted  to  other  backs,  he  reveled  in  it;  indulged  in 
caprices  like — once  more — a  popular  debutante. 

His  last  portrait,  painted  by  Burton  in  nineteen  ten — just 
a  year  before  Anne's  wedding,  that  was — shows  this  very 
plainly.  It  is  a  three-quarters  length,  seated  portrait,  and  it 
makes  the  most,  of  course,  of  the  huge  mass  of  the  body,  the 
thick  round  shoulders,  the  great  bald  dome  of  a  head,  and 
the  jutting  brows.  But  the  eyes  are  simply  those  of  a  bad 
little  boy  and  there  is  a  quirk  of  pure  mischief  in  the  corner 
of  the  mouth. 

Hannah,  as  I  have  said,  never  spoiled  him.  And  when  she 
rebuked  him,  as  she  had  done  this  morning,  he  nearly  always 
passed  it  on  to  somebody  else.  The  disposal  of  the  burglar 
without  consulting  him  gave  him  more  of  an  excuse  than  he 
needed  for  jumping  into  Gregory. 

A  burglar  was  his  own  affair.  It  was  upon  his  personal 
property  that  the  assault  had  been  made,  and  it  had  been  a 
piece  of  damned  presumption  to  let  him  sleep  through. 

Gregory  was  pretty  sleepy,  of  course ;  not  at  all  in  the  mood 
for  a  tussle  with  the  old  gentleman.  So  he  passed  the  re 
sponsibility  along. 

"I  hadn't  anything  to  do  with  it,"  he  said.  "Hugh  caught 
him.  Or  rather,  young  Jean  did,  and  Hugh  took  him  over. 
And  after  the  line  he  took  when  he  came  in  and  told  us  about 
it,  there  was  nothing  to  do — for  me  anyway.  Father  might 
have  interfered,  I  suppose,  but  he  didn't." 

When  the  old  gentleman  wanted  to  know  what  the  line 
was  that  Hugh  had  taken,  Gregory  turned  uncommunicative — 
or  tried  to.  "I'd  rather  Hugh  told  you  himself.  He  said 
he  was  going  to." 


40  AST   AMEBICAX   FAMILY 

But  the  old  man  wouldn't  let  him  off.  "You  disagreed 
with  Hugh  then/'  he  said.  "Tell  me  what  line  you  took." 

Gregory,  handicapped  as  he  was  by  the  habit  of  respect  and 
obedience,  was  no  match  at  all  for  his  grandfather's  skill  as  a 
cross-examiner,  and  before  they  had  finished  breakfast,  the 
old  gentleman  was  in  possession  of  all  the  essential  facts, 
including  Hugh's  attribution  of  the  moral  responsibility  for 
the  burglar's  lapse  to  their  own  "inhuman"  organization  at 
the  plant.  Young  Gregory  even  quoted,  confessing  that  it  had 
troubled  him  a  little,  Hugh's  statement  that  they  wouldn't 
allow  a  machine,  just  because  it  had  started  a  bolt  or  two,  to 
thrash  itself  to  junk  without  interfering. 

The  old  man  grunted  at  this.  "But  if  it  is  junk/'  he 
said,  "we  send  it  to  the  junk-pile  whether  it's  started  by  a  bolt 
or  not.  We  haven't  a  human  junk-pile.  Good  thing  if  we 
had." 

Dwellers  in  an  earthquake  country  require  for  their  reas 
surance  a  succession  of  small  shocks.  If  more  than  the  normal 
period  goes  by  without  one,  they  begin  to  wonder.  And  as 
the  period  protracts  itself,  this  uneasiness  approaches  dread. 
And  with  good  reason;  because  the  eventual  shock  is  likely 
to  be  disastrous. 

The  Corbett  family  had  much  the  same  attitude  toward  the 
old  man.  Nobody  was  very  much  afraid  of  him  except  when 
he  was  quiet.  So  the  fact  that  his  grandfather  fell  silent  after 
that  last  remark  of  his  about  the  human  junk-pile  and  al 
lowed  Hannah  to  fuss  over  him  without  protest  as  he  made 
his  preparations  to  leave  for  the  office,  worried  Gregory  a 
good  deal. 

The  Corbett  works  were  out  at  Eiverdale — a  suburb  ten 
or  a  dozen  miles  west  of  the  city,  of  which  more  hereafter. 
Before  the  days  of  the  automobile,  one  got  out  there  by  train. 
There  was  a  period  of  a  quarter  of  a  century,  I  suppose, 
during  which,  on  every  week-day,  with  very  rare  exceptions, 
old  Gregory  Corbett  might  have  been  seen  driving  a  team  of 
long-tailed  trotters  to  a  side-bar  buggy  down  to  the  Western 
Depot  in  time  for  the  seven-twenty-eight  train.  He  was 
pever  so  regular  about  coming  back,  since  a  day's  work  never 


THE    HOUSE  41 

ended  for  him  until  it  was  done.  But  black  Jim  used  to  drive 
the  team  down  again  to  meet  the  six-fifteen. 

Of  course,  he  kept  no  such  hours  now.  But  it  was  still  his 
habit,  except  in  the  worst  of  weather,  to  drive  out  with  his 
eldest  grandson  in  the  car.  His  enormous  personal  mail 
still  went  out  there  (ninety-five  per  cent,  of  it,  of  course,  was 
requests  for  money  for  charitable  purposes,  or  other)  and 
this,  with  the  aid  of  a  case-hardened  spinster  secretary,  he 
disposed  of.  Then  he  strolled  about  the  plant  for  a  while 
and  was  always  made  happy  if  he  could  find  some  minute 
thing  to  make  a  perfectly  terrific  row  about.  The  sight  of 
any  litter  always  infuriated  him,  and  he  would  often  pick  it 
up  himself  and  exhibit  it,  damningly,  to  some  one  he  could 
hold  responsible  for  its  being  there.  Humble  employees  of 
old  standing  sometimes  accosted  him  on  these  rounds  with 
complaints  of  injustice — a  distinctly  sporting  proposition  this, 
because  though  he  always  exploded,  it  was  impossible  to  fore 
cast  whether  his  victim  would  be  the  appellant  or  the  de 
fendant.  In  a  word,  that  morning  round  of  his  was  his 
own  version  of  Haroun  Al  Raschid.  He  went  back  home  at 
noon  for  the  meal  he  still  called  dinner — it  was  dinner,  too — 
and  slept  for  an  hour  afterward.  Then,  four  days  in  six,  he 
went  out  to  the  plant  again  and  waited  for  Gregory  to  come 
home  with  him. 

On  this  morning,  after  the  conversation  about  Hugh's  bur 
glar,  they  drove  all  the  way  out  to  the  plant  in  an  almost 
unbroken  silence.  Even  the  ticklish  moment  caused  by  an 
other  car's  cutting  across  in  front  of  them,  failed  to  evoke 
the  habitual  accusation  of  reckless  driving.  In  the  main  office, 
just  after  their  arrival,  they  encountered  a  man  in  the  organ 
ization  whom  old  Gregory  did  not  like.  But  his  grandson 
noted  that  he  spoke  to  him,  though  absently,  with  an  effort 
almost  at  politeness.  Eeally,  it  was  ominous. 

Gregory  had  to  come  back  at  eleven  o'clock  for  the  church 
rehearsal  of  Anne's  wedding,  and  by  that  time  the  matter  had 
grown  so  much  more  serious  that  he  called  Hugh — rid  of  his 
burglar,  for  the  time  being — aside  to  talk  to  him  about  it. 

"I've  got  you  in  most  horribly  wrong  with  grandfather," 


43  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

he  said.  "It  wouldn't  have  happened,  of  course,  if  I  hadn't 
been  grouchy  and  half  asleep.  As  it  was,  I  spilled  the 
beans."  He  went  on  and  gave  Hugh  an  account  of  the  con 
versation  at  the  breakfast  table.  "It  has  a  rotten  look  of  tale 
bearing,  I  know,  and,  of  course,  that's  what  it  comes  to.  But 
I  didn't  mean  it  that  way." 

Hugh  made  light  of  it,  of  course.  The  notion  of  suspect 
ing  Greg  of  doing  an  unsportsmanlike  thing  was  positively 
grotesque.  But  Gregory  hadn't  finished  his  story. 

"You're  in  for  it,"  he  insisted.  "Just  before  I  came  back 
Bailey  told  me,  confidentially,  that  grandfather  sent  for  him 
about  ten  o'clock  and  asked  him  how  long  it  would  take 
him  to  find  somebody  to  replace  you  at  the  Youngstown 
laboratory ;  told  him  to  look  around  for  somebody." 

Hugh  gave  his  brother  an  incredulous  stare  at  that;  then 
his  face  darkened.  "All  right,"  he  said  shortly.  "If  that's 
the  way  he  feels  about  it,  it's  time  he  did  get  somebody  else." 

"Oh,  don't  you  go  off  at  half-cock  just  because  I  did," 
Gregory  urged.  "It's  all  my  fault.  You  can  see  how  he  feels. 
That  plant's  his.  He  made  it,  and  a  crack  like  the  one  you 
made  about  it  last  night  got  him,  of  course.  Just  the  way 
it  got  me,  only  more  so.  But  he  won't  really  do  anything. 
After  all,  father's  president  of  the  company  and  he  wouldn't 
consent  to  that  any  more  than  I  would.  Only — you  spoke 
of  taking  it  up  with  him  yourself,  this  afternoon.  Grand 
father,  I  mean.  Well,  don't,  if  you  want  my  advice.  Give 
him  a  chance  to  cool  out.  Yourself,  too,  for  that  matter.  Of 
course,  I'm  the  original  idiot,  but  that's  done  and  can't  be 
helped." 

"Oh,  I  think  I'll  go  to  him,"  Hugh  said.  "You  told  him 
I  meant  to,  didn't  you?  I'll  try  not  to  make  him  a  speech. 
But  don't  you  worry.  It's  no  fault  of  yours,  whatever  hap 
pens." 

Hugh  had  got  to  the  point  where  his  sense  of  humor,  his 
ironic  invisible  smile,  would  not  serve ;  to  the  point  where  re 
bellion  was  the  only  thing  that  would.  He  had  reached  it 
cumulatively,  of  course.  There  was  more  behind  it  than  the 
story  of  the  beaten,  hopeless,  desperate  man  he  had  found 


THE    HOUSE  43 

in  the  library  last  night  riveted  in  his  tracks  by  plucky  little 
Jean's  revolver.  Three  years'  life  in  a  steel-mill  town  was 
behind  it.  And  behind  that,  in  turn,  was  the  year  of  travel 
around  the  world,  the  five  years'  comfortable  residence,  post 
and  undergraduate,  at  the  University,  the  expensive  school — 
the  best  preparatory  education  that  money  could  buy — and 
the  big  house  on  the  Lake  Shore  Drive. 

Behind  that,  again,  and  not  without  their  influence  for  all 
his  personal  memory  did  not  reach  back  to  them,  were  the 
pioneer  hardships  of  old  Grandfather  Gregory,  who  had  begun 
at  twenty  building  wagons  for  the  'forty-niners  to  cross  the 
plains  in.  All  that  background  of  vivid  contrast  lay  behind 
and. reflected  a  lurid  light  on  the  lives  of  those  dazed  toilers 
who  flocked  back  and  forth  twice  a  day,  at  the  end  and  the 
beginning  of  their  twelve-hour  shifts,  in  the  street  his  labor 
atory  windows  looked  out  upon. 

The  sight  of  them  going  by  hardly  ever  failed  to  give  him 
a  momentary  feeling  of  dull  discomfort  and  caused  him  some 
hours  of  deep  depression.  They  worked  no  harder,  he  knew, 
and  no  longer,  than  his  grandfather  must  have  done  in  those 
early  days.  But  what  a  difference  there  was  in  the  spiritual 
significance  to  themselves  of  that  labor!  He  wondered  that 
they  were  so  tame — submissive  to  a  lot  like  that.  Their 
patient  acquiescence  hurt  him.  All  signs  of  a  broken  spirit 
hurt  him.  The  sight  of  an  old  horse  meekly  dragging  a 
heavy  load,  was  bad  enough.  But  here  were  men — thousands 
of  them — dragging  theirs,  with  no  better  a  hope. 

These  were  hardly  so  much  ideas  of  his  as  they  were  sensa 
tions.  He  made  no  attempt  to  think  out  a  remedy.  There 
was,  he  supposed,  no  remedy.  Certainly  the  panaceas — social 
ism,  for  instance — were  plain  impostures.  He  had  gone  to 
a  socialist  meeting,  once,  one  night  in  New  Haven  (an  ex 
traordinarily  catholic-minded  thing  for  one  of  his  set  to  do), 
and  one  hour  of  it  had  been  enough  for  him.  Either  the 
speaker  was  a  crafty  knave  or  his  simple  credulity  had  been 
shockingly  imposed  upon  by  others  who  were.  He  would  have 
had  his  audience  believe  that  men  like  Hugh's  grandfather 
were  scheming  parasites,  whose  only  labor  consisted  in  con- 


&4  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

spiring  subtly,  bribing  newspapers,  corrupting  judges,  bring 
ing  down  remote  retributions  on  those  few  daring  souls  who 
opposed  their  relentless  will;  which  was,  the  continued  and 
completed — if  it  were  not  complete  already — enslavement  of 
the  working  class.  Hugh  grunted  impatiently  and  got  up 
and  walked  out.  That  was  all  there  was  to  that ! 

Then  there  \vere  the  unions.  His  grandfather  had  always 
opposed  them  implacably.  His  policy  had  always  been  to 
keep  a  sharp  lookout  for  men  of  exceptional  character  and 
ability  among  his  employees  and  promote  them  as  fast  as  lie 
could;  and  the  proportion  among  the  foremen,  superintend 
ents  and  executive  officers  in  his  organization,  of  men  who 
had  come  up  from  the  bottom,  was  an  eloquent  testimonial 
to  the  success  with  which  he  accomplished  it.  Certainly  his 
men  didn't  need  unions  to  insure  their  being  fairly  treated. 
Still  Hugh  was  inclined  to  think  unions  all  right — when  they 
had  decent  leaders,  as  they  often  had  not — and  in  some  cases, 
unhappily,  necessary.  But  he  found  it  hard  to  believe  that 
"decently"  behaved  unions  would  go  far  to  remedy  the  case 
of  those  thousands  who  streamed  by  his  windows.  Very 
likely  there  was  nothing  that  would.  But  it  hurt  just  the 
same. 

It  is  very  easy  to  go  wrong  in  judging  a  man  by  a  failure 
to  realize  that  his  thinking  and  his  imagination  work,  in  dif 
ferent  fields,  on  very  different  levels;  that  a  brilliant 
mathematician,  for  example,  may  talk  and  think  about  politics 
as  crudely  and  dishonestly  as  if  he  had  no  mind  at  all. 
Hugh's  mind,  with  its  passion  for  precise  data  and  clean  dis 
tinctions  worked  badly  in  a  field  where  a  looser  method  was 
called  for.  The  painful  throb  and  blur  of  the  great  human 
problem  outside  his  windows  was  beyond  him.  He  could  not 
get  it  into  sharp  focus.  So,  when  he  could,  he  looked  away 
from  it. 

What  he  needed,  of  course,  to  break  down  this  inhibition 
was  a  concrete  case — something  that  he  could  look  at,  not 
down  from  his  high  windows  into  the  street,  but  squarely,  eye 
to  eye.  And  the  meager  shivering  man  he  found  in  the 
library  that  night,  provided  it.  The  way  he'd  looked  at 


THE   HOUSE  45 

those  sandwiches  was  the  starting  point.  The  man,  in  sheer 
exhaustion,  had  told  his  story  almost  as  simply  as  Hugh  had 
retailed  it  in  the  billiard-room  afterward,  without  generalities 
or  appeals — nothing  about  the  rich  and  the  poor.  Just  his 
facts. 

His  grandfather  hadn't  known  those  facts,  of  course;  nor 
his  father,  nor  Greg.  His  grandfather,  he  knew,  would  have 
intervened  instantly,  if  the  story  of  that  wife  had  come  to 
his  ear,  or  the  sight  of  that  wounded  hand  to  his  eye.  Only, 
among  the  thousands  of  employees  who  came  and  went,  were 
taken  on  and  laid  off,  the  chance  of  that  intervention  had 
grown  toe  remote.  It  was  horrible  to  think  how  remote  it  was. 

The  remedies  were  surely  simple  enough.  They  came  crowd 
ing  into  his  mind  before  the  story  was  half  told.  There  ought 
to  be  men — some  sort  of  humanity  inspectors — in  the  organ 
ization,  whose  business  it  was  to  look  out  for  things  like 
that.  Wasn't  it  actually  done  in  other  places?  Hadn't  he 
seen  articles  about  that  sort  of  thing  in  the  magazines?  He 
felt  sure  he  had.  Then  there  was  Panama.  He  did  know 
about  that. 

The  opposition  he  had  encountered  from  the  assembled 
family  in  the  billiard-room  had  simply  chilled  and  hardened 
his  resolution  to  make  good  the  promise  he  had  given  the 
burglar. 

The  morning  he  had  spent  in  verifying  the  man's  story — 
and  he  had  been  able  to  verify  it  up  to  the  hilt — had  brought 
him  up  to  the  point  of  incandescence  again.  It  is  literally 
true  that  he  had  never  had  the  hideous  fact  of  poverty  in 
his  hands  before,  where  he  could  really  look  at  it — where 
there  was  no  possibility  of  looking  around  it — and  the  ex 
perience  staggered  him.  And,  to  make  it  worse,  if  worse 
were  needed,  the  social  gaieties  and  futilities  of  Anne's  wed 
ding  threw  an  ironic  glare  of  light  upon  it. 

It  was  about  four  o'clock  in  the  afternoon  when  Hugh 
went  up-stairs  to  his  grandfather's  room,  in  response  to  Han 
nah's  information  that  the  old  gentleman  was  awake  now  and 
would  see  him.  He  was  probably  less  incommoded  than  any 
pf  his  brothers  would  have  been — even  less,  perhaps,  than  his 


46  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

father,  for  that  matter — by  the  sensation  of  actual  fear.  His 
grandfather  had  never  been  quite  so  formidable  to  him  as 
he  was  to  the  rest  of  them;  but  even  he  felt  pretty  hollow  as 
he  approached  the  door.  His  determination  to  see  the  thing 
through  without  any  compromise  or  equivocation  was  per 
fectly  inflexible.  And,  since  outright  insubordination  and  de 
fiance  were  things  the  old  man  had  hardly  encountered  from 
anybody  in  all  Hugh's  lifetime,  it  was  hard  to  imagine  the  ap 
proaching  scene  as  ending  in  anything  short  of  a  complete 
smash. 

Hugh  steadied  himself  with  a  breath  or  two  before  he 
knocked.  He  hoped  not  to  rant — not  to  make,  as  he  had 
said  to  Greg,  a  speech.  If  he  could  just  leave  all  the  violence 
to  his  grandfather,  then  whatever  happened  he  wouldn't  be 
sorry  for.  He  knocked. 

"That  you,  Hugh  ?"  old  Gregory  called.    "Come  in/' 

Hugh  entered,  to  encounter  what  was  probably  the  most 
completely  disconcerting  experience  he  had  ever  had  in  his 
life. 

The  old  man  lay  flat  on  his  back  in  his  great  old-fashioned, 
monumental  black-walnut  bed,  the  bandanna  handkerchief 
which  had  been  over  his  eyes  pushed  back  just  enough  so  that 
he  could  see,  his  hands  clasped  peacefully  across  his  stomach 
• — an  attitude  so  utterly  out  of  keeping  with  Hugh's  rather 
exalted  mood  that  it  made  him,  for  the  moment,  feel  ridicu 
lous.  Then,  at  the  reflection  that  this  no  doubt  was  exactly 
how  his  grandfather  had  meant  to  make  him  feel,  he  stiffened 
up  again. 

"Well,"  old  Gregory  said  witH  a  drawl  he  used  sometimes 
when  he  was  especially  enjoying  himself,  "they've  been  telling 
me  about  the  burglar  you  caught  last  night  and  tucked  up  to 
sleep  instead  of  turning  over  to  the  police.  How  about  him  ? 
Had  he  been  telling  you  the  truth?" 

"Yes,  sir,"  Hugh  answered  shortly.    "Part  of  it." 

"So  he's  one  of  my  victims,  eh  ?"  the  old  man  suggested. 

Here  was  a  cunningly  prepared  temptation  for  a  speech, 
gnd  Hugh  nearly  fell  into  it.  But  he  pulled  up  and  said : 


THE    HOUSE  4V 

"If  you  like  to  look  at  it  that  way,  yes,  sir." 

"If  I  like !"  his  grandfather  echoed.  "What  have  my  lik 
ings  to  do  with  it  ?  What  do  you  mean  by  saying  'if  I  like'  ?" 

"I  mean,"  said  Hugh,  "that  he's  been  the  victim  of  the 
organization  out  there  rather  than  your  personal  victim/' 

"I  made  the  organization,  didn't  I?" 

"I'd  always  supposed,"  said  Hugh,  "that  a  thing  like  that 
grew  more  or  less  by  itself.  You  could  change  it,  no  doubt, 
in  any  respect  that  you  saw  fit.  That  was  what  I  meant  by 
saying  it  was  as  you  liked." 

The  old  gentleman  grunted.  Whatever  he  may  have  meant 
by  that,  he  clearly  couldn't  have  expected  an  answer  to  it.  So 
Hugh  stood  silent.  Presently  old  Gregory  wanted  to  know 
what  Hugh  had  done  with  the  burglar  and  was  informed, 
briefly,  that  Judge  Harkness  had  paroled  the  man  to  Hugh. 

"What  are  you  going  to  do  with  him  now  you've  got  him? 
Take  him  and  his  family  back  to  Youngstown?" 

Hugh  admitted  he  didn't  know. 

"It's  a  pretty  good  idea  to  know  where  you're  going  to 
bring  up  before  you  start,"  observed  the  old  man  with  more 
drawl  than  ever. 

"Desirable,"  said  Hugh,  "but  not  possible  always.  There's 
no  use  trying  to  decide  anything  before  you've  got  all  the 
data."  He  paused,  then  added :  "When  I've  finished  this  talk 
with  you,  I'll  decide  what  to  do  with  him — and  his  family,  of 
course." 

His  grandfather  granted  again  and  the  talk  lapsed  into 
silence.  This  time  a  long  one. 

Hugh  went  over  to  the  window  and  stared  blankly  out  across 
the  lawn.  The  absence  of  violence  on  the  old  man's  part  made 
him  almost  as  nervous  as  it  had  made  Gregory  that  morning. 

At  last,  "Where'd  you  get  these  notions  of  yours  about 
loose  bolts  and  junk-piles,  medical  inspectors  and  insurance 
and  so  on?  Been  talking  with  your  father  about  it,  eh?" 

"I  didn't  know  he  had  any  of  those  ideas  until  he  spoke 
to  me  about  it  last  night,"  said  Hugh.  "I  don't  know  where 
I  got  mine  from.  Just  out  of  the  situation,  I  guess." 


48  AN   AMEHICAN   FAMILY 

"It  is  your  notion  now,  though,"  persisted  the  old  man. 
"You  think  we  ought  to  change  the  organization  to  provide 
for  cases  like  that?" 

"Yes,  sir." 

"All  right.  Do  it,"  said  his  grandfather,  and  pulled  his 
bandanna  down  over  his  eyes  again  as  if  the  conversation 
were  ended. 

Hugh  stared  at  him  stupefied.  "You  mean,"  he  asked  in 
credulously,  "that  you  want  that  work  done?  And  that  you 
want  me  to  take  charge  of  it?  That's  a  pretty  special  kind 
of  work,  I  suppose.  I  don't  know  anything  about  it." 

"You  could  learn,  couldn't  you?" 

"Yes,"  said  Hugh,  "I  can  learn."  Irresistibly  he  added: 
"If  you're  serious." 

At  that  the  old  gentleman  snatched  the  bandanna  off  his 
eyes.  "Serious !"  he  shouted.  "Why,  damn  your  impudence ! 
Did  you  ever  hear  me  make  a  joke  about  the  business  ?" 

"I  apologize,"  said  Hugh.  "I'm  a  little  bit — paralyzed, 
that's  all." 

"Well,  don't  be  paralyzed,"  growled  the  old  man.  "And 
Son't  be  a  damn  fool.  We'll  have  a  new  department — What 
is  it  your  father  calls  it? — Welfare?  You're  head  of  it. 
There's  a  directors'  meeting  the  twentieth  of  next  month.  If 
you're  ready  to  ask  for  an  appropriation  by  then,  I'll  see 
that  you  get  it.  Now  clear  out.  I'm  going  to  finish  my  nap." 

He  did  not  go  to  sleep  again  after  his  grandson  had  left 
the  room,  but  lay  there  in  bed  for  a  while  longer,  a  curious 
grim  smile  on  his  old  mouth,  and  a  gleam,  almost  of  mis 
chief,  in  his  half-shut  eyes.  It  was  an  expression  that  flick 
ered  across  his  face  more  than  once  during  the  succeeding 
days,  whenever  the  subject  of  Hugh's  astonishing  victory  and 
its  corollaries  was  referred  to  in  the  family  circle. 

The  only  person  who  ever  got  a  clew  to  the  meaning  of  that 
expression  was  Hugh's  mother.  She  talked  the  matter  out 
with  the  old  man  a  few  days  later,  when  Anne  was  safely 
married  and  out  of  the  way,  Hugh  gone  back  to  Youngstown 
to  install  his  successor  in  the  laboratory,  and  the  ordinary 
routine  of  life  taken  up  again. 


THE    HOUSE  49 

haven't  gone  soft  in  your  old  age/'  she  said  to  her 
father-in-law.  "You  can  never  make  me  believe  that.  I'd 
like  to  know  why  you  did  it." 

"Hugh's  the  best  of  the  lot,"  old  Gregory  said.  "His  older 
brother's  well  enough  in  his  way.  He's  a  good  worker,  but 
he  has  to  run  on  rails.  Hugh  there,  can  lay  his  own  rails, 
and  I'm  not  going  to  have  him  spoiled  the  way  I  spoiled  his 
father.  He  can  have  all  the  rope  he  wants — try  any  sort  of 
damned  nonsense  he  wants  to  try.  Get  it  out  of  his  system. 
When  he  finds  it  doesn't  work,  he'll  he  honest  enough  to 
acknowledge  it.  He'll  be  without  a  grievance  then,  anyhow. 
You'll  see.  Give  him  a  year." 

But  Hugh's  mother  looked  pretty  thoughtful,  and  not  at 
all  convinced.  She  applauded  the  old  man's  shrewdness — - 
could  find  no  fault  at  all  with  his  reasoning.  But  that  second 
son  of  hers  had  been,  from  boyhood,  an  enigma  to  her.  She 
could  feel  none  of  the  grandfather's  complacent  confidence  in 
those  clever  calculations  of  his.  Giving  Hugh  plenty  of  rope, 
dashing  him  against  the  hard  human  problem  out  there  at 
the  plant  in  order  to  get  the  nonsense  out  of  his  system, 
struck  her  as  a  little  like  a  proposal  to  throw  a  stick  of  dyna 
mite  against  a  wall  in  order  to  get  the  explosiveness  out  of  its 
system. 

Of  course,  there  was  no  use  saying  anything  like  that  to  her 
father-in-law. 


BOOK  II 

RIVERDALE 

CHAPTEE  IV 

THE  original  Corbett  factory  was  burned  up  in  the  Chi 
cago  fire,  and  before  it  had  done  smoldering,  old  Greg 
ory  (not  old  then,  though;  just  getting  into  his  prime) 
began  his  preparations  for  rebuilding  out  at  Riverdale.  It 
was  one  of  the  stories  he  never  tired  of  telling,  how  he  rallied 
his  employees  and  encamped  them  in  tents  upon  the  twenty- 
acre  tract  along  the  river,  which  he  had  purchased  while  the 
great  conflagration  was  still  raging;  how  they  built  wooden 
shacks  to  live  through  the  first  winter  in,  and  how  they  began 
building  wagons  by  hand  in  a  big  wooden  shed  before  the  first 
machinery — ordered  to  replace  that  destroyed  by  the  fire — 
arrived.  It  was  a  matter  of  well-founded  pride  with  him  that 
within  a  year  of  the  disaster,  their  production  was  greater 
than  ever  it  had  been  before. 

Previous  to  its  invasion  by  the  Corbett  works,  Riverdale 
had  been  a  sleepy  country  town  which  hardly  considered  itself 
a  suburb  of  Chicago,  although  some  of  its  finer  houses  were 
owned  b^  men  whose  financial  interests  were  in  the  city.  The 
results  of  Gregory  Corbett's  activities  spread  over  the  town, 
its  indignant  elder  citizens  used  to  say,  like  a  blight.  The 
original  twenty  acres  soon  proved  inadequate  to  the  huge  ex 
pansion  of  the  enterprise.  On  down  the  river  and  up  the  hill 
side,  it  spread  and  went  on  spreading.  At  the  end  of  forty 
years — in  nineteen  eleven,  that  is  to  say,  when  our  story  be 
gins,  the  area  occupied  by  the  works  themselves  was  about  a 
hundred  and  twenty  acres,  while  miles  of  bleak,  dusty,  shade- 

50 


BIVERDALE  51 

less  streets  housed  its  thousands  of  operatives  and  their 
families. 

Hugh,  making  his  first  rounds  of  the  place  in  his  new 
capacity,  found  it  an  amazing — a  rather  terrifying — phenom 
enon.  He  had  been  familiar  with  it,  of  course,  from  boyhood. 
He,  like  his  brothers,  had  often  been  taken  out  there  for  a 
holiday  treat.  He  could  remember  a  day  that  he  had  spent 
the  whole  of  (he  couldn't  have  been  more  than  ten)  run 
ning  one  of  the  great,  creaking  freight  elevators  at  a  glacial 
speed,  answering  the  calls  of  the  bell — one  ring,  five  rings, 
three  rings — with  an  almost  unbearable  sense  of  responsibility. 
But  he  saw  it  now  with  a  fresh  eye. 

It  would  make  an  interesting  study  for  a  historian,  he 
thought — almost  for  a  geologist,  with  its  curious  outcrop- 
pings;  as  for  instance,  that  bit  of  inexplicable  old  mansard 
roof  with  an  elaborate  stamped  iron  cornice,  shouldering  its 
way  into  the  sky-line  between  two  huge  walls  of  strictly  utili 
tarian  brick.  Sudden  urgencies,  now  forgotten,  had  thrown 
up  mushroom-like  growths  between  solider  buildings  of  excel 
lent  mill-construction,  or  had  converted  buildings  to  uses 
wildly  inappropriate  to  their  original  design. 

Hugh  made  the  discovery,  although  he  had  been  in  the 
room  dozens  of  times  before,  that  his  grandfather's  office 
had  once  been  the  drawing-room  of  a  fine  old  house;  the 
elaborate  trim  still  remaining  about  the  doors  and  windows 
proclaiming  unmistakably  the  fact  that  here,  encysted  in 
this  great  industrial  body,  was  what  had  once  been,  for  those 
times,  an  opulent  home,  caught,  surrounded,  swallowed  up  by 
a  tide.  There  was  no  tracing  its  original  plan.  That  big 
old  drawing-room  and  the  dusty  little  court  with  a  tattered 
cottonwood  tree  that  its  windows  looked  out  upon,  was  all 
that  was  left  of  it. 

There  were,  of  course,  great  modern  shops  besides,  built 
of  reinforced  concrete  with  saw-tooth  roofs.  There  were  great 
wood-drying  kilns  whose  introduction  old  Gregory  had  long 
held  out  against,  and,  in  consequence,  the  newest  thing  about 
the  plant. 

The  organization  of  the  business  was  a  rough  analogy  to 


52  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

the  structure  of  the  buildings.  There  were  men  in  it  whose 
original  functions  had  entirely  disappeared  and  who  remained 
only  vestigially  like  the  caudal  vertebrae  or  the  vermiform 
appendix.  There  were  men,  on  the  other  hand,  whose  humble 
titles  had  never  been  changed,  though  their  responsibilities 
had  become  enormous.  There  were  old  men  who  had  worked 
in  the  Chicago  factory  back  before  the  fire.  One  of  Hugh's 
discoveries  was  a  grizzled  watchman  sevent}r-eight  years 
old,  who  walked  his  eighteen  miles  (three  rounds  of  six  mile? 
each)  every  night  in  the  year,  except  that  on  alternate  Sun 
days  he  walked  four  rounds  and  two,  respectively,  in  order  to 
change  watches  with  a  not  very  much  younger  colleague. 
Hugh's  unsuccessful  attempt  to  retire  this  worthy  on  a  pen 
sion  infuriated  the  man  himself  no  less  than  it  did  his  grand 
father. 

The  organization  was  not  altogether  made  up  of  anomalies 
like  that;  naturally,  since  it  worked.  Corresponding  to  tJio 
great  modern  machine-shops  and  the  kilns,  were  modern,  able, 
aggressive  men — men  like  Bailey,  the  general  production  man 
ager,  for  example,  or  Howard,  head  of  the  purchasing  de 
partment,  whom  old  Gregory  detested. 

The  plant,  so  far  as  its  labor  went,  was  what  is  known  as 
an  open  shop.  For  many  years — longer  than  might  have  beeu 
expected — its  owner  had  succeeded  in  keeping  it  absolutely 
non-union.  The  fact  that  it  was  out  in  the  country  and,  still 
more,  the  fact  that  it  employed  men  of  at  least  a  half  a  hun 
dred  different  crafts,  had  made  this  possible. 

It  was  in  nineteen  hundred  that  the  policy  of  non- 
discrimination  against  union  men  was  adopted.  That  was  the 
year  in  which  Gregory,  then  seventy  years  old,  reincorporated 
the  business,  elected  his  son  Robert  president  of  it — himself 
retaining  the  chairmanship  of  the  board  of  directors — and 
signified  his  abdication  by  going  off  on  his  first  trip  to  Europe. 
The  Paris  Exposition  was  his  immediate  objective,  but  he 
went  from  there  on  around  the  world.  With  every  year  after 
his  return  his  grip  on  the  vital  processes  of  the  business 
sensibly  slackened.  He  concerned  himself  more  and  more 
with  minutiae.  The  new  lines  of  manufacture  that  were  un- 


RIYKRDALE  53 

dertaken  on  the  tillage  implement  side,  especially  the  motor- 
driven  implements  and  tractors,  he  paid  very  little  attention 
to.  The  old  wagon  works  was,  as  it  had  always  been  really, 
his  chief  concern. 

He  did  not,  at  the  time  when  he  so  abruptly  ordered  Hugh 
to  establish  a  welfare  department,  at  all  realize  how  far  out 
of  the  main  current  he  was.  He  still  had  an  enormous  ac 
quaintance  among  the  sales  force  and,  on  the  wagon  side, 
among  the  operatives.  And,  anyhow,  the  business  was  his, 
wasn't  it?  He  had  made  it.  Who  should  know  it  if  he  did 
not?  In  a  word,  it  was  a  child  of  his  and  he  made  the  mis 
take  about  it  that  parents  so  often  make  about  their  grown-up 
children.  And,  as  parents  so  often  do,  he  came  in,  at  the 
end  of  his  life,  for  a  tragic  disillusionment. 

The  most  destructive  strike — almost  the  only  serious  one — 
in  the  history  of  the  Corbett  works,  broke  out  about  a  year 
after  Hugh  took  charge  of  the  newly-created  welfare  depart 
ment.  One  wishes,  looking  back  upon  such  a  catastrophe, 
that  it  were  possible  really  to  assess  the  cost  of  it ;  dreams  of 
some  superman  of  science  capable  of  beginning  his  computa 
tion  at  the  point  where  the  mere  reckoner  of  material  damages 
leaves  off;  a  biological  physicist  he  would  have  to  be,  who 
could  measure  the  human  energies  misdirected,  emotional 
losses  in  misunderstanding  and  hatred,  lives  warped  and 
blighted  by  it — to  the  second  generation,  anyway,  if  not  to 
the  scriptural  third  and  fourth.  But  his  unattainable  totals 
would  doubtless  be  incredible,  too. 

Our  only  concern  with  this  great  Corbett  strike  is  the  effect 
it  had  on  a  mere  handful  out  of  the  thousands  of  lives  it 
changed;  and  of  that  handful,  primarily  two,  Hugh  Corbett 
and  another  whose  life  was,  as  a  result  of  it,  inseparably 
bound  up,  for  a  while,  with  his — Helena  Galicz. 

The  thing  had  an  apparently  trivial  beginning  with  the 
appearance  in  Bailey's  office,  one  Monday  morning,  of  three 
girls  who  announced  that  they  were  a  committee  of  the  core- 
makers  authorized  to  demand  a  decrease  in  their  hours  from 
ten  to  eight,  and  an  increase  in  pay  of  twenty-five  per  cent. 


54  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

If  these  demands  were  not  granted  immediately,  the  entire 
force  of  core-makers  would  walk  out  when  the  noon  whistle 
blew. 

These  core-makers — they  numbered  about  forty — were,  with 
the  exception  of  a  few  trimmers  over  in  the  upholstery  de 
partment  of  the  obsolescent  buggy  factory,  the  only  women 
operatives  in  the  entire  plant. 

Core-making  is  not  a  skilled  trade.  If  you  have  ever  seen 
children  playing  in  damp  sand,  making  imaginary  cakes  and 
pies  with  tin  molds,  you  will  have  a  rudimentary  idea  of  it. 
The  core-makers  molds  are  of  brass,  exquisitely  accurate  and 
satin-smooth  to  touch.  You  pack  the  damp  sand  (it  is  damp 
ened  with  oil  and  contains  some  sort  of  binder  like  flour) 
into  one  of  these  molds,  slide  it  gently  back  and  forth  over 
a  steel-faced  table,  slice  the  surplus  sand  off  neatly  with  a 
knife,  take  half  the  mold  away  and  with  the  other  half  push 
your  row  of  little  cylinders  or  what-not  into  their  rank  in  the 
tray,  dust  your  mold  with  a  brush,  and  repeat  the  process. 
When  your  tray  is  full  you  carry  it  to  the  oven  where  your 
little  pies  are  baked  hard.  The  molders  use  them  for  making 
the  hollow  parts  of  castings,  which  can  not  be  modeled  up  in 
green  sand. 

There  is  nothing  difficult  about  it;  what  little  knack  there 
is  can  be  quickly  learned.  There  is  nothing  dangerous  about 
it,  either,  or  unhealthy,  or — for  that  matter — onerous.  Any 
twelve-year-old  child  would  find  it  fun — for  half  an  hour  or 
so.  You  get  very  hot  and  dirty,  of  course,  especially  in  sum 
mer;  for  in  addition  to  the  roaring  cupolas  of  the  foundry 
itself,  and  the  incandescent  iron  being  slopped  around  like 
soup  in  an  untidy  kitchen,  there  are  the  great  core-ovens, 
their  iron  doors  as  near  as  possible  to  your  tables  to  save 
distance  in  carrying  the  trays.  And  if  you  worked  at  it  the 
ten  hours  a  day  which  this  little  group  of  girls  out  at  Cor- 
bett's  rebelled  at,  and  six  days  a  week,  and  fifty-two  weeks  a 
year  (if  you  were  lucky  enough  not  to  get  laid  off)  you  would 
probably  find  it  intensely  monotonous. 

The  demands  which  the  committee  made  upon  Bailey,  like 
the  threat  with  which  they  attempted  to  enforce  them,  were  ab- 


RIVERDALE  55 

surd.  The  notion  of  forty  unskilled  young  girls  trying  these 
hold-up  methods  on  the  Corbetts  was  almost  pitiable.  One 
might  have  expected  the  manager  to  tell  them  to  go  ahead  and 
strike,  in  the  confident  expectation  that  three-quarters  of  them 
would  be  back  on  the  job  at  seven  the  next  morning,  ready 
to  go  on  at  the  old  scale  and  suffer  the  disciplinary  fine  which 
their  half-day's  absence  during  working  hours  had  cost  them. 

Instead  of  doing  that,  Bailey  looked  thoughtful  for  a  min 
ute  or  two  at  the  end  of  the  hearing,  then  told  the  girls  to  wait 
in  his  outer  office  and,  by  telephone,  asked  for  a  conference 
with  Robert  Corbett,  Senior,  and  his  son  Gregory. 

"I  can't  see  that  it's  anything  to  worry  about,"  Gregory 
said,  when  he  and  his  father,  in  that  gentleman's  office,  had 
heard  the  manager's  report.  "What  they  ask  is  nonsense, 
of  course.  But  I  don't  believe  they  mean  it  anyway.  They've 
probably  gone  crazy  with  the  heat.  One  of  them  fainted, 
very  likely,  and  the  rest  got  hysterical."  (It  was  hot — un 
seasonably  hot  for  May.  Gregory  and  the  manager  were  both 
in  their  shirts  with  their  sleeves  rolled  up,  and  Mr.  Corbett 
in  silver-gray  alpaca.) 

"Two  of  them  have  fainted,"  said  Bailey,  "and  it  seems 
there's  been  a  locomotive  on  the  switch-track  just  outside  their 
windows  most  of  the  morning,  filling  the  place  with  smoke 
and  gas." 

Gregory  nodded.  "That's  all  there  is  to  it.  I  don't  say 
it  isn't  enough.  But  according  to  the  weather  man,  it's  going 
to  be  cooler  to-morrow.  They'll  blow  off  steam  this  afternoon, 
and  then  come  back  and  be  good — till  next  time,  anyway. 
There's  nothing  to  do  about  it,  unless  you  want  to  consider 
letting  them  off  their  fines  when  they  come  back." 

He  arrested,  half-way,  a  move  to  rise  from  his  chair,  while 
he  turned  to  his  father  for  confirmation.  Then,  seeing  that 
his  father  did  not  mean  to  confirm  his  view,  at  least  not 
unequivocally,  he  dropped  back  again  with  a  trace  of  im 
patience. 

"I  don't  think/'  Robert,  Senior,  said,  "that  Bailey  looks  at 
it  quite  that  way,  or  he  wouldn't  have  sent  for  us.  Do  you  ?* 

"I  don't  know  whether  I  do  or  not,"  the  manager  con- 


56  AN   AM.E1UCAX    FAMILY 

fessed.  "One  of  those  girls  rather  stumped  me — the  one  who 
did  the  talking.  She  struck  me  as  being — phony,  somehow." 

Both  his  listeners  echoed  the  word;  Gregory  in  sharp  con 
cern,  his  father  in  interrogation.  He  didn't  know  what  Bailey 
meant. 

"Why,"  the  manager  explained,  "she  doesn't  look  nor  talk 
like  a  regular  core-maker.  I'm  sure  she  hasn't  been  here 
long.  I've  been  in  the  core-room  in  the  last  two  weeks  and 
I  know  she  wasn't  there  then.  She's  the  sort  you  couldn't 
miss  in  four  hundred,  let  alone  forty.  I  don't  know/'  he  went 
on,  "she  got  me  going  somehow.  Talked  mighty  good  En 
glish,  for  one  thing,  but  when  she  wanted  to  confab  with  the 
other  two,  she  jabbered  in  some  wop  language — Russian, 
maybe — faster  than  the  others.  I  couldn't  get  away  from  the 
idea  that  she  had  something  up  her  sleeve.  Not  that  she  had 
any  sleeves  on;  arms  were  bare  to  the  shoulders,  and  mighty 
pretty.  What  I  mean  is  she  seemed  to  expect  I'd  turn  them 
down,  and  had  her  next  move  all  doped  out.  Maybe  I'm 
crazy  with  the  heat,  too.  But  I  thought  I'd  tell  you  about  it." 

"If  I  follow  you,"  said  Eobert,  Senior,  "your  idea  is  that 
she  got  employment  here  with  us  for  the  express  purpose  of 
fomenting  trouble?  That  she's  some  sort  of  professional 
agitator?" 

"It  struck  me  that  that  was  possible ;  yes,  sir." 

"Assuming  that  your  theory  is  correct,"  the  president  went 
on,  "what  course  of  action  would  you  recommend?" 

"I'm  not  sure  that  I'm  ready  to  'recommend'  anything. 
Only,  if  she  is  dynamite — and  she  certainly  has  the  look 
of  it — it  might  be  worth  considering  giving  the  girls  what 
they  ask  for,  the  shorter  hours,  anyway,  and  discharging  her." 

"Discharge  her,  anyway,  I'd  say,  on  the  chance," — this  was 
Gregory — "and  make  a  point  of  seeing  she  leaves  town.  But 
giving  in  to  the  others  strikes  me  as  bad  business.  It  might 
start  a  pretty  awkward  precedent — especially  with  things  in 
a  rush  as  they  are  right  now.  Of  course,  if  they've  got  a 
real  grievance  either  as  regards  hours  or  pay,  we  want  to 
consider  it.  But  we  don't  want  'em  to  get  the  notion  that  the 


BIVEfiDALE  57 

way  to  get  their  grievances  considered  is  to  hold  a  gun  to 
our  heads." 

Bailey  turned  inquiringly  from  the  son  to  the  father.  If 
he  agreed,  there  was  nothing  more  to  he  said. 

In  the  main,  it  appeared,  Robert,  Senior,  agreed  with  his 
son.  Certainly  as  far  as  principle  went — that  it  didn't  do 
to  yield  under  a  threat.  He  shared  the  manager's  misgivings, 
however,  and  wanted  a  point  made  of  ahating  the  nuisance 
of  the  switch-engine  as  far  as  possible.  If  the  matter  could 
be  arranged,  it  should  do  its  smoking  somewhere  else  than 
right  outside  those  windows. 

"But,  as  far  as  this  committee  goes,"  summarized  Bailey, 
"I'm  to  turn  them  down  flat  and  warn  the  girl  off  the  place 
altogether?"  He  didn't  want  any  ambiguity  about  his  in 
structions. 

"Yes,"  Robert  answered  to  that,  "that  seems  to  be  the  only 
thing  to  do." 

Outside  the  office,  the  manager  detained  Gregory  a  moment, 
"Want  to  drop  into  my  office,  casual-like,  after  a  minute 
or  two,  for  a  look  at  her  ?  As  a  sight  alone  she's  worth  it." 

Gregory  didn't  much  like  to.  Any  act  different  in  intent 
from  what  it  appeared  on  its  face  to  be  came  hard  to  him. 
But  he  could  see  that  Bailey  had  not  made  the  suggestion 
idly.  So  he  walked  into  the  manager's  office  from  the  cor 
ridor  just  after  the  committee  of  core-makers  had  been  ad 
mitted  by  the  other  door  and  stood  there  with  a  fairly  well 
assumed  air  of  merely  awaiting  the  manager's  leisure  to  take 
up  a  matter  of  real  importance. 

"There's  nothing  doing  in  the  hold-up  line  to-day,  girls," 
Bailey  was  saying.  "You  run  along  and  strike.  This  is  a 
good  afternoon  for  it.  If  you  show  up  to-morrow  morning 
when  the  gates  open,  you  can  all  have  your  jobs  back — all 
but  one  of  you.  If  you  don't,  we'll  replace  you.  You  want 
to  remember  that  we're  always  ready  to  hear  complaints  about 
hours  or  pay,  or  working  conditions.  But  we  don't  like 
threats  and  they  never  get  anything  from  us.  That's  all." 

So  far  he  had  been  talking  to  the  two  girls  who  had  hung 


58  AX   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

back  near  the  door.  Now  he  turned  to  the  third  who  had 
walked  well  into  the  room  and  stood  near  one  of  the  open 
windows,  courting,  it  appeared,  the  hot  sunlight  that  was 
streaming  in.  It  threw  her  face  into  the  shade,  but  lighted 
in  her  dark  hair  mysterious,  metallic  glints  of  copper.  Greg 
ory  had  not  needed  the  manager's  "I  have  something  more  to 
say  to  you?  to  single  her  out  as  the  girl  he  had  spoken  of 
up-stairs  as  "dynamite." 

Bailey  must  be  right  about  her  newness  in  the  place.  One 
couldn't  have  overlooked  her  anywhere.  She  was  clearly  not 
of  American  ancestry.  She  came,  he  guessed,  from  some 
where  east  of  the  axis  of  the  Adriatic.  But  there  was  about 
her  nothing  of  that  squat  heaviness  which  he  associated  with 
the  Slav  race.  She  had,  on  the  contrary,  a  resilient  look,  as 
of  one  lightly  poised,  tensely  strung;  there  was  a  touch  of 
insolence  about  the  lift  of  her  young  head.  She  was  dirty, 
of  course ;  the  foundry  alone,  on  a  hot  morning,  without  the 
assistance  of  the  locomotive  outside  the  window,  would  have 
insured  that.  But  it  struck  Gregory — an  utterly  unsolicited 
and  distinctly  annoying  emotion — that  he  wished  she  might 
be  washed,  her  arms,  her  face,  and  that  extraordinary  hair 
of  hers,  especially.  Wasn't  there  something  almost  patrician 
about  her  features  ? 

As  Bailey  rounded  upon  her  with  that  truculent  "you"  she 
turned  also  upon  him  (she  had  been  intently  watching  the 
other  girls'  faces  until  then)  and  her  movement  had  as  much 
calculated  hostility  about  it  as  his.  Gregory  fairly  felt  the 
shock  of  their  encountered  eyes.  It  was  like — to  take  some 
thing  as  unlike  it  as  possible — two  knights  splintering  lances 
in  the  lists.  And  it  was  Bailey  who  was  unhorsed;  at  any 
rate  he  had  to  catch  his  breath,  and  the  girl  spoke  first. 

"Threats!"  she  said.  "You  don't  like  threats.  You've 
made  other  people  eat  them  so  long  it's  time  you  learned  the 
taste." 

"Well,  I'm  not  going  to  threaten  you,"  said  the  manager. 
"I'm  going  to  tell  you  two  or  three  facts  and  you  want  to  get 
them  straight  in  your  mind,  because  they're  important.  First 
fact:  you're  discharged.  Second  fact:  we  don't  allow  dis- 


EIVEKDALB  59 

charged  employees  hanging  about  the  place.  Third  fact:  we 
know  all  about  you  and  what  you're  here  for,  and  you'll 
probably  find  it  more  convenient  and  profitable  to  leave  River- 
dale  altogether  and  start  your  game  somewhere  where  they 
don't." 

"And  if  I  stay?"  she  asked.    "If  I  decide  I  like  it  here?" 

"The  law's  got  resources  for  dealing  with  dangerous  vag 
rants.  I  advise  you  not  to  try  conclusions  with  it." 

The  girl  laughed  and  made  a  contemptuous  movement  with 
her  hands. 

And  now  it  struck  Gregory  that  she  was  acting — playing 
out  a  scene ;  that  if  she  had  written  Bailey's  speeches  for  him 
and  rehearsed  him  in  them,  he  couldn't  have  served  her  pur 
pose  better.  Was  he,  Gregory,  the  audience  she  was  playing 
to,  or  those  two  apron-plucking  girls  by  the  door  ?  She  hadn't 
looked  at  him  once,  save  for  a  glance  when  he  came  into  the 
room. 

"The  same  old  methods !"  she  said.  "The  same  old  brutal 
stupidities :  hired  police,  a  hired  judge,  and  a  hired  jail — what 
you  call  the  Law !  You'll  never  learn.  There  have  been  kings 
like  you." 

Magnificently  she  strode  across  to  the  door,  flung  it  open 
and  shepherded  the  girls  out.  Then,  from  the  doorway,  she 
turned  back  for  a  last  word. 

"Do  what  you  can,"  she  adjured  Bailey.  "Then  see  what 
we  can  do." 

She  left  Gregory  tingling — a  fact  he  was  careful  to  conceal 
from  Bailey  when  he  congratulated  the  manager  on  his  man 
ner  of  dealing  with  the  situation.  They  agreed,  with  trans 
parent  insincerity,  that  the  girls  would  probably  come  back 
to  work  in  the  morning  and  that  they  had  seen  the  last  of  the 
firebrand.  Then  each  went  back  to  his  own  work.  But  the 
memory  of  the  scene  kept  nagging  at  Gregory  all  day.  He 
got  what  satisfaction  he  could  out  of  his  discovery  that  the 
girl  had  been  acting.  But  the  reflection  that  a  genuine  pas 
sion  might  well  enough  garb  itself  histrionically,  pretty  well 
did  away  with  that.  He  wondered  where  the  devil  she  came 
from ;  who  she  was ;  where  she  had  picked  up  that  vocabulary. 


60  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

There  was  an  irritating  babu  touch  about  it — the  accent  of 
the  person  who  has  acquired,  somehow,  an  amount  of  book- 
knowledge  greater  than  his  cultural  level  entitles  him  to. 
She  had  negotiated  the  word  "stupidities"  quite  successfully, 
save  for  the  hissed  s's,  but  she  had  brought  the  polysyllable 
out  in  the  manner  of  one  for  whom  it  was  once  an  achieve 
ment.  Some  of  her  phrases  stuck:  "There  have  been  kings 
like  you/'  Rant,  of  course,  but  pretty  good  rant.  Was  she 
really  prophesying  the  guillotine  for  himself  and  his  father — 
and  poor  Bailey? 

Half-way  through  the  dictation  of  a  letter  to  Hugh,  late 
that  afternoon  (Hugh  was  away  for  a  couple  of  weeks  study 
ing  the  welfare  system  in  operation  in  some  of  the  factories 
of  the  Lake  Erie  district),  he  broke  off  short  and  sank  into 
an  abstraction,  oblivious  for  a  long  while  of  the  expectantly- 
poised  pencil  of  his  stenographer.  If  Hugh  knew  that  there 
was  a  strike  on  here  at  the  works,  he'd  come  straight  back. 
And  wouldn't  it,  perhaps,  be  a  little  better  if  he  didn't  come 
back ;  at  least  for  three  or  four  days,  until  they  had  had  time 
to  get  rid  of  that  girl  ?  If  she  could  stir  up  Bailey — prosaic 
Bailey — and  himself — as  there  was  no  denying  she  had  done 
that  day — what  mightn't  she  do  to  Hugh?  She  was  dynamite. 
Bailey  was  right  about  that.  And  Hugh  .  ,  . ! 

"That's  all/'  he  said  to  the  stenographer.  "I'll  not  send 
that  letter." 


CHAPTER  V 

HUGH  got  his. first  news  of  the  strike  from  a  Chicago 
paper  he  bought  Saturday  noon,   five  days  later,  in 
Toledo.     The  story  was  on  the  front  page  and  the 
black-faced,  two-column  head, 

RIOTING    AT    RIVERDALE— MANY    HURT    WHEN 

DEPUTIES  CHARGE  STRIKERS— CORBETT 

WORKS   IN   STATE    OF    SIEGE! 

held  him  staring  for  a  matter  of  seconds  in  blank  incredulity. 
It  was  impossible.  There  was  no  strike  at  the  Corbett  works. 
Certainly  he  ought  to  know. 

However,  the  detailed  account  amply  confirmed  the  head 
lines.  It  was  hard  to  make  anything  like  a  sequence  out 
of  it,  but  the  trouble  had  apparently  begun  with  the  molders, 
who  had  walked  out,  Hugh  gathered,  three  days  before — on 
Wednesday,  that  would  have  been.  Hugh  could  not  find  a 
statement  anywhere  of  what  their  demands  were.  Evidently 
the  trouble  had  spread  like  a  conflagration  and  had  been  ac 
companied,  from  the  first,  by  serious  disorder,  which,  by 
Friday  morning,  had  reached  the  pitch  of  violence.  Of  that 
day's  doings,  the  paper  contained  a  fairly  consecutive  account. 
There  had  been  rioting  at  all  the  gates  in  the  morning,  when 
the  still  loyal  operatives  went  in  to  work.  There  had  been 
a  succession  of  street  fights  during  the  day,  arrests  and  res 
cues,  attempts  to  tear  down  or  to  prevent  the  nailing  up  of 
inflammatory  placards,  attempts  to  disperse  street-corner 
meetings ;  most  of  which  had,  it  appeared,  more  or  less  disas 
trously  failed. 

But  the  incident  which  furnished  the  material  for  the  head 
lines  occurred  at  six  o'clock  that  night,  when  the  plant  shut 
down  and  the  hastily-sworn-in  deputies  attacked  a  mob  of  sev- 

61 


62  AN"   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

eral  hundred  men  gathered  at  the  Charles  Street  gate  to  await 
the  emergence  of  the  workers.  In  this  affair  the  deputies 
were  roughly  handled.  One  of  them  was  shot  and  several  of 
them  badly  beaten.  The  number  of  casualties  among  the 
strikers  was,  of  course,  unknown.  This  was  as  far  as  Hugh's 
paper  went  in  any  detail,  though  a  later  bulletin  stated  that 
at  a  late  hour  preparations  were  being  made  to  house  and 
feed  the  loyal  operatives  in  the  plant. 

Hugh  had  an  engagement  to  spend  Sunday  at  Dayton,  but 
he  canceled  this  over  the  telephone,  and  took  the  next  train  for 
Chicago,  as  sore  in  mind  as  those  beaten  deputies  must  be 
in  body.  The  feeling  he  tried  hard  to  dismiss  until  there 
should  have  been  a  chance  for  explanations,  but  which,  never 
theless,  required  dismissing  pretty  often,  was  anger  against 
his  family — particularly  against  Gregory — that  he  had  not 
been  summoned  home  days  before;  that  he  should  have  been 
left  to  learn  of  a  thing  that  came  as  close  home  as  this,  along 
with  the  general  public,  from  a  newspaper. 

He  had,  to  be  sure,  been  out  of  communication  with  the 
office  for  forty-eight  hours,  owing  to  a  change  of  his  plans, 
which  it  had  not  seemed  necessary  to  inform  them  about  by 
wire.  But  surely  Gregory  must  have  seen  the  thing  coming, 
on  Tuesday  morning,  when  he  had  talked  to  him  over  the 
phone  from  Detroit.  Did  they  think  his  judgment  of  so  little 
account — and  in  a  matter  that  concerned  his  own  special  de 
partment  of  the  work,  too — as  to  be  merely  negligible?  Or 
had  his  absence  been  calculated  upon  as  making  it  easier 
to  adopt  a  policy  they  knew  he  would  not  approve  of  ? 

It  was  hard  to  decide  which  of  these  alternatives  gave  him 
the  more  ground  for  indignation.  Of  course  his  amour  propre 
deserved  no  consideration  anyway,  in  the  face  of  a  crisis  like 
this.  If  they  believed  they  could  steer  the  ship  better  without 
him  in  the  wheel-house,  they  were  perhaps  right  to  try  it. 
Only,  such  a  decision  requires  to  be  justified  by  the  event 
and  no  one  could  call  this  event  prosperous.  It  was  inconceiv 
able  to  Hugh  that  out  of  the  seeming  security  of  a  week  ago 
a  conflagration  could  have  spread  through  the  entire  works, 
as  apparently  this  one  had  done,  unless  the  men  engaged  in 


KIVERDALE  63 

fighting  it  had  been  throwing  on  oil  instead  of  water.  What 
ever  provocation  there  may  have  been  must  have  been  met 
with  a  counter-provocation  ten  times  worse. 

He  could  imagine  Greg  getting  very  stiff  and  Prussian 
over  some  unreasonable  demand  that  roused  his  fighting 
blood.  But  what  had  his  father  been  thinking  about  to  let 
him  go  on  like  that  ? 

In  one  of  the  other  papers — Hugh  had  bought  all  he  could 
find,  of  course,  when  he  took  the  train— he  had  come  upon  a 
paragraph  about  a  young  woman,  giving  her  name  as  Helena 
Galicz,  who  had  been  arrested  outside  the  plant  upon  a  charge 
of  disorderly  conduct  and  fined  fifty  dollars — the  maximum 
under  the  law.  The  fine  had  been  paid  and  the  girl  was  al 
leged  to  have  stated  that  her  arrest  was  the  result  of  an  at 
tempt  made  by  officers  of  the  company — and  in  pursuance  of  a 
direct  threat  by  them — to  run  her  out  of  town.  She  was 
further  alleged  to  have  prophesied  a  repetition  of  this  attempt 
at  the  first  opportunity. 

The  paragraph  fairly  bristled  with  the  excisions  of  a  dis 
creet  city  editor — palpably  omitted  more  than  it  said,  and 
left  Hugh  angrier  than  ever.  Who  could  be  stupid  enough 
to  hope  for  any  but  disastrous  results  from  a  piece  of  silly 
brutality  like  that?  Gregory,  of  course,  couldn't  have  had 
anything  to  do  with  it !  And  yet  Hugh  couldn't  manage  to 
feel  as  sure  of  this  as  he  pretended  to  be. 

The  fact  was  that  between  these  two  brothers  a  certain  an 
tipathy  of  mind  which  had  existed  since  boyhood  had  sharp 
ened  and  defined  itself,  since  Hugh's  return  from  Youngs- 
town,  to  the  point  where  it  could  not  always  be  ignored. 
These  antipathies  are  the  commonest  thing  in  the  world  in 
families.  They  do  not  prevent  their  possessors  from  feeling 
the  highest  respect  or  even  the  warmest  affection  for  each 
other ;  they  do  not  stand  in  the  way  of  costly  sacrifices.  They 
are  likely  to  go  unacknowledged  for  a  lifetime.  But  none  the 
less — all  the  more,  indeed,  for  this  reluctance  to  define  and 
evaluate  them — they  cause  an  immense  amount  of  wear  and 
tear. 

The  Corbetts  were,  to  be  sure,  a  free-spoken  lot.    None  of 


64  AX   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

them  had  any  trouble  in  calling  much  uglier  and  more  indeli 
cate  objects  than  spades  by  their  shortest  names.  It  was  the 
imponderables  that  bothered  them.  In  the  case  of  Hugh  and 
Gregory  the  fine  particles  of  grit  that  so  often  got  in  between, 
when  their  minds  bore  upon  each  other,  were  too  minute  to 
be  detected  except  by  the  exasperation  they  produced.  Why 
should  they  make  each  other  bristle  like  that  the  moment  they 
set  about  talking  anything  over?  They  did,  even  when — as 
far  as  a  working  basis  went — they  agreed  completely. 

Gregory  was  marked,  of  course,  for  head  of  Corbett  & 
Company,  Incorporated,  as  soon  as  his  grandfather  died  and 
his  father  retired.  Neither  event  could  be  very  far — in 
years — away.  He  enjoyed  the  business,  the  prestige  his  posi 
tion  in  it  gave  him  among  the  important  men  of  the  city. 
When  the  time  came — and  it  was  not  very  far  away  either — 
when  they  would  be  asking  him  to  speak  at  public  dinners 
and  when  reporters  would  be  coming  to  him  for  interviews 
on  subjects  which  the  news  of  the  day  had  brought  up  for 
discussion,  he  would  like  that  too,  and  do  it  well.  On  the 
whole  he  liked  success  and  in  a  close  case  he  was  disposed  to 
give  it  the  benefit  of  the  doubt.  But  for  all  that,  Hugh  need 
not  put  him  down  for  a  pompous  stupid  ass. 

Hugh  did  not,  to  be  sure;  but  there  was,  now  and  then,  a 
glint  of  something  about  his  manner — an  edge  in  the  turn 
of  a  phrase,  which  suggested  something  a  little  like  that. 
Gregory  was  scrupulously  anxious,  too,  not  to  take  advantage 
of  his  brother;  to  see  that  he  came  in  for  his  share.  He 
didn't  mean  to  be  patronizing  about  it,  of  course,  but  his 
manifest  belief  that  Hugh  could  not  look  out  for  himself 
came  to  about  that. 

Hugh'  would  have  been  bored  to  death  by  the  sort  of  reso 
nant  importance  Gregory  found  enjoyable.  lie  wouldn't  have 
taken  the  presidency  of  Corbett  &  Company  except  under  un 
avoidable  compulsion.  The  people  he  liked  were  the  surprising 
sort  and  it  mattered  very  little  to  him,  for  purposes  of  ordi 
nary  friendly  intercourse,  what  their  social  status  happened 
to  be.  He  liked  to  read  metallurgical  monographs.  He  liked 
to  spend  unregulated  hours  down  at  the  University  labora- 


EIVEEDALE  65 

tory  watching  some  fascinating — though  perhaps  utterly  non> 
utilitarian — experiment  through.  But  for  all  that,  Gregory 
needn't  think  him  a  visionary  idealistic  prig.  Gregory  did 
not — not  more  than  ten  per  cent,  of  that. 

The  job  Hugh's  grandfather  had  given  him — of  "human 
izing"  the  plant — was  probably  better  calculated  than  any 
other  could  have  been  to  accentuate  this  mental  antipathy  be 
tween  the  two  brothers.  It  was  particularly  hard  on  Hugh, 
who  could  not  help  feeling  that  Greg  regarded  all  his  projects 
and  experiments  as  so  much  harmless — harmless,  that  is,  if 
not  too  expensive — moonshine;  that  he  was  waiting  toler 
antly  for  their  demonstrated  failure  to  bring  matters  back  to 
a  reasonable  basis  again. 

His  job  would  have  been  difficult  enough  without  that 
handicap,  as  any  welfare  worker  will  testify.  It  is  hard 
enough  even  now;  and  a  lot  has  been  learned  since  nineteen 
hundred  and  eleven,  when  Hugh  went  to  work.  There  wasn't 
very  much  recorded  experience  for  him  to  go  on  and  he  made, 
out  there  at  Riverdale,  some  of  the  mistakes,  at  least,  once 
for  all.  Eeading  an  article  which  appeared  a  year  or  two 
ago  in  one  of  the  sociological  magazines — The  Riverdale  Expe 
riment:  a  Retrospect,  is  the  title  of  it — one  might  easily  get 
the  idea  that  the  record  of  Hugh's  work  during  that  year 
was  a  compendious  classic  of  mistakes,  a  veritable  vade-mecuin 
for  the  sociologist  on  how  the  thing  should  not  be  done.  But 
then  the  cocksureness  of  sociologists  about  the  present  right- 
ness  of  their  methods  necessitates,  since  these  methods  change 
from  hour  to  hour,  a  drastic  repudiation  of  those  of  yes 
terday. 

Hugh's  starting  point  was  Jean's  burglar.  His  idea  was  to 
begin  at  any  rate  by  making  it,  as  nearly  as  might  be,  impos 
sible  that  the  disasters  which  had  befallen  that  man  should 
be  repeated. 

The  remedies  he  improvised  that  night  in  the  billiard-room 
turned  out  to  be  a  pretty  fair  forecast  of  the  lines  he  after 
ward  followed.  Disease  and  injury  were  the  first  things  to  be 
attacked.  He  established  a  dressing  station,  manned  by  a 
doctor  and  a  nurse,  where  all  injuries,  down  to  the  most 


66  AX   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

minute,  were  instantly  to  be  brought,  and  where  all  newly- 
employed  persons  were  to  be  examined  before  they  were  al 
lowed  to  go  to  work.  He  supplemented  this  almost  at  once 
with  two  out-nurses  whose  duty  it  was  to  look  up  in  their 
homes  all  employees  who  reported  sick.  And  he  planned  a 
hospital  where  not  only  employees  themselves  but  their  fam 
ilies  could  get  medical  and  surgical  attendance  free,  and  pay 
nothing  but  their  board  (this  being  nominal,  and  scaled  to 
their  wages)  if  they  had  to  stay  there.  Men  injured  in  the 
course  of  duty  would  get  free  board. 

Then  there  were  preventive  measures — compulsory  goggles 
for  grinders  and  others  whose  work  exposed  their  eyes  to 
flying  particles — safety  clamps  for  handling  objects  which 
must  be  thrust  into  rapidly-revolving  cutting  machinery  (the 
toll  of  fingers  and  hands  taken  by  a  machine  like  a  wood- 
shaper  is  appalling),  guards  for  low  counter-shafts  and  belts, 
safety  set-screws  in  collars,  automatic  gates  for  elevators,  and 
so  on. 

So  far  he  was  on  fairly  safe  ground,  though  even  here  he 
met  opposition  and  unexpected  difficulties.  His  out-nurses 
were  regarded — and  resented — as  spies,  and  with  a  certain 
amount  of  reason,  when  you  come  to  think  of  it.  To  the 
workman  who  has  reported  sick  in  order  to  get  an  unlicensed 
holiday,  or  even  to  work  off  the  alcoholic  effects  of  an  author 
ized  one  the  day  before,  the  intrusion  into  his  home  of  an 
agent  of  his  employer,  brisk,  skeptical,  asking  after  facts 
which  certainly  were  no  business  of  hers,  was,  to  put  it  mildly, 
annoying.  And  even  when  the  sickness  was  genuine,  there  was 
likely  to  be  a  feeling  that  it  was  one's  own  affair  and  subject 
only  to  such  remedial  measures  as  one  might,  himself,  elect. 

But  Hugh  struck  his  real  snag  when  he  attacked  the  second 
of  his  burglar's  difficulties.  This  was,  of  course,  poverty,  or — 
as  Hugh,  trying  to  state  it  a  little  more  accurately,  put  it — - 
the  too-narrow  factor  of  financial  safety.  They  lived  comfort 
ably  enough,  most  of  these  people;  were  adequately  fed  and 
decently  housed  and  clad.  The  trouble  was  that  they  lived 
so  near  the  edge  that  any  sort  of  accident — such  as  a  baby, 
or  a  period  of  half-time  during  the  slack  season,  or  a  visit 


RIVERDALE  67 

from  a  temporarily-embarrassed  relative — brought  them  at 
once  into  the  breakers.  And  a  series  of  happenings  like  this— 
as  in  the  case  of  the  burglar — meant  shipwreck,  ruin,  de 
spair. 

What  they  needed,  Hugh  figured  out,  was  mainly  three  thinga 
all  in  the  line  of  moving  possible  disaster  a  few  steps  farther 
away.  They  needed  insurance,  they  needed  some  resources 
of  credit,  and  they  needed  thrift.  It  is  not  necessary  to  go 
into  details  as  to  his  devices  for  meeting  these  needs.  The 
sick-insurance  fund  was  provided  by  a  percentage  draw-back 
from  the  men's  wages,  which  amount  was  doubled  by  the 
corporation.  The  credit  difficulty,  which  the  loan-sharks  bat 
tened  on,  was  met  by  the  establishment  of  a  banking  depart 
ment,  where  any  employee  (with  a  good  record)  could  bor 
row,  without  collateral  and  at  reasonable  interest,  the  small 
amounts  he  sometimes  needed  to  tide  him  over. 

There  were  numerous  devices  for  the  encouragement  of 
thrift,  but  the  center  of  them  was  the  Company  Stores,  where 
one  could  buy,  so  the  slogan  went,  honest  articles  at  honest 
prices.  The  prices  were  a  little  better  than  honest,  as  a  mat 
ter  of  fact,  for  they  represented  wholesale  cost  plus  the  small 
est  possible  overhead  charge  for  operation  and  carrying,  and 
no  profit  whatever.  Fuel,  food  and  clothing  were  what  Hugh 
began  with,  but  he  hoped  eventually  to  be  able  to  supply 
everything  anybody  could  reasonably  want,  up  to  and  includ 
ing  a  common-sense  funeral. 

He  was  not  long  in  experiencing  the  truth  of  the  proverb 
about  the  relative  difficulty  of  leading  a  horse  to  water  and 
getting  him  to  drink,  especially  when  he  does  not  like  the  look 
of  the  water. 

Hugh  expected  criticism,  of  course — hoped  for  it — went 
out  of  his  way  to  get  it.  The  details  of  his  plans  must  be  full 
of  mistakes,  and  the  people  most  likely  to  be  able  to  point 
them  out  to  him  were  the  employees  themselves.  It  exasper 
ated  him  to  find,  among  the  older  men — the  men  his  grand 
father  called  by  their  first  names — an  adamantine  Toryism 
that  outdid  Gregory's  own.  They  were  aristocrats  with  a 
truly  aristocratic  inaccessibility  to  ideas,  an.d  an  almost  more 


68  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

than  aristocratic  contempt  for  the  great  unassimilated  mass 
of  man-power  which  the  suction  of  the  expanding  business 
had  drawn  in  from  all  over  the  world. 

Going  for  guidance  to  samples  of  this  latter  class,  he  found 
what  he  was  slow  to  recognize  as  downright  suspicion  of  the 
integrity  of  his  motives.  It  is  always  bewildering  to  a  candid 
man  to  discover  that  his  good  faith  is  questioned,  and  it  was 
hard  for  Hugh  to  realize  that  these  people  saw  in  his  benevo 
lent  projects  a  subtle  stroke  against  their  liberties;  talked  of 
spies  and — still  more  horrible  word  — "agents." 

Of  course,  it  was  true  that  the  operation  of  all  his  plans 
necessitated  a  certain  amount  of  investigation  of  their  bene 
ficiaries,  and  even  supervision  of  their  lives  out  of  working 
hours.  You  couldn't  pay  sick-benefits  to  a  man  who  was 
shamming  without  doing  an  injury  to  honest  men  who  did 
not  sham.  And  you  couldn't  be  expected  to  loan  a  man  money 
until  you  had  looked  into — and  regulated — matters  which 
bore  upon  the  question  of  his  eventual  solvency.  Why,  old  Mr. 
Corbett  himself,  when  he  wanted  to  borrow  money — and  he 
had  borrowed  a  lot  of  it  at  one  time  and  another — had  to 
submit  to  the  most  rigid  investigation,  and  not  infrequently 
to  being  told  what  he  might  or  might  not  do  with  the  money 
when  he  got  it. 

Hugh  was  rather  pleased  when  he  thought  of  using  his 
grandfather  as  an  example.  But  it  was  not  serviceable.  The 
people  he  tried  it  on  looked  as  if  they  didn't  believe  that 
rich  men  ever  had  to  borrow  money. 

It  was  bad  enough  to  be  tolerated  for  a  fool  idealist,  as  he 
was  tolerated  by  Greg  and  the  old  aristocrats  in  the  plant. 
But  to  be  suspected  of  being  a  subtle  scheming  liar  .  .  . ! 

Oh,  patience  was  the  main  thing  the  job  needed,  of  course. 
Confidence  was  not  a  plant  of  the  mushroom  family,  and  in 
as  hard  lean  a  soil  as  this  their  lives  had  been  planted  in, 
there  was  no  wonder  it  grew  slowly.  They'd  have  to  see  the 
thing  work  for  a  while  to  their  advantage,  before  they  be 
lieved  in  it. 

This  hard  joyless  monotony  of  their  lives  came  to  seem  to 
Hugh  as  something  as  much  in  need  of  amelioration  as  any- 


EIVEEDALE  69 

thing  else.  There  ought  to  be  some  provision  for — fun.  He 
was  in  the  act  of  planning,  when  the  strike  broke  (it  was  all 
in  the  future,  of  course.  His  grandfather  had,  for  the  present, 
gone  his  limit),  the  erection  of  a  great  recreation  building 
which  should  contain  a  combined  dance-hall  and  theater,  a 
gymnasium,  bowling-alleys,  pool-tables,  reading-rooms  and  a 
soft-drink  bar.  And  there  ought  to  be  a  park  with  a  band 
stand  in  it. 

It  had  been  a  blow  to  him  to  find,  in  this  last  Ohio  trip  of 
his,  that  the  great  manufacturer  who  had  gone  furthest  along 
this  line,  was  feeling  bitter  about  it.  It  hadn't  worked  well. 
His  people  had  seemed  actually  resentful  of  his  thoroughly 
benevolent  attempts  to  provide  for — and,  at  the  same  time 
sensibly  regulate — their  recreations. 

He  had  never  felt  so  despondent  about  this  new  work  of  his 
as  on  that  Saturday  morning  in  Toledo  before  he  bought  the 
Chicago  paper  and  read  about  the  strike.  He  had  a  secret 
day-dream,  as  most  men  have,  to  seek  momentary  haven  in 
when  the  strains  and  distractions  of  actuality  become  too 
grievous.  Hugh's  was  a  metallurgical  laboratory  of  his  own ; 
a  place  where  truth  was  an  exactly  ascertainable  thing — 
where  human  greeds  and  suspicions  and  exigencies  could  be 
stopped  at  the  door.  He  had  never  longed  for  it  as  he  longed 
for  it  that  morning. 

But  the  sharp  emergency  of  the  strike,  of  violence,  of  the 
need  for  decisive  action,  stiffened  him;  cleared  his  despon 
dency  away  like  a  great  sweep  of  wind.  He  was  done  with  im 
ponderables,  thank  God ! 

Hugh's  train  got  in  to  Chicago  just  before  dinner-time  and 
he  went  straight  out  to  the  house  to  find  his  mother  dining 
there  alone. 

"I  thought  you'd  be  coming  back/'  was  her  greeting,  "now 
that  this  hullabaloo  is  in  the  papers." 

"That's  the  first  I  heard  of  it,"  said  Hugh,  and  wanted  to 
be  told  where  everybody  was. 

His  father,  it  seemed,  was  in  conference  with  the  governor 
— no,  not  in  Springfield — the  governor  had  come  up  to  town — 
over  the  question  of  calling  aut  the  National  Guard. 


70  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

"Your  grandfather  doesn't  want  it  done.  He  and  Gregory 
are  out  at  the  plant.  I  haven't  seen  'em  for  two  days.  They 
didn't  come  home  last  night  at  all." 

"I'm  going  out  there  myself,"  Hugh  said,  "as  soon  as  I 
can  get  something  to  eat  and  find  out  from  you  what  if s 
all  about." 

"The  Lord  knows  what  it's  all  about,"  said  his  mother. 
"At  least  I  hope  so.  Nobody  else  does." 

"What  you  know  about  it  will  do  to  go  on,"  he  told  her. 
"Only  begin  at  the  beginning,  please.  When  did  it  begin  ?" 

It  was  an  odd  paradox  about  Hugh's  relation  with  his 
mother  that  while  they  disagreed  violently  on  nearly  all  sub 
jects,  and  while  she  loudly  proclaimed  her  inability  to  under 
stand  him,  she  liked  him  better  and  got  on  with  him  more 
easily — with  less,  that  is,  of  those  family  frictions  we  have 
been  talking  about — than  with  her  eldest  eon  whose  side  in 
disagreements  she  usually  took. 

"Gregor}%"  she  had  been  heard  to  say,  "insists  on  respecting 
me,  which  is  an  attitude  I  can't  endure.  It's  because  I'm  his 
mother  he  does  it.  Otherwise  he  wouldn't  approve  my  smok 
ing  cheap  cigarettes.  He  drives  me  wild,  bringing  me  things, 
standing  around  like  an  infernal  butler — a  bit  reproachful 
about  it.  Hugh's  got  none  of  that  nonsense  about  him  at  any 
rate." 

Hugh  felt,  always,  perfectly  at  ease  with  his  mother,  even 
when  they  were  quarreling — or  doing  what  between  any  other 
two  people  would  be  quarreling — most  furiously.  It  was  an 
unexpected  bit  of  good  fortune — this  opportunity  to  sit  down 
and  have  dinner  with  her  alone,  and  find  out  about  everything 
before  his  encounter  with  the  others. 

Her  account  began  with  Monday  night,  when  she  had  seen 
at  dinner  that  both  her  husband  and  her  son  had  something 
that  they  were  not  discussing  before  old  Gregory — who,  it 
happened,  had  been  feeling  the  heat  a  bit  and  had  not  gone 
out  to  Eiverdale  that  day.  They  told  her  later  about  the 
strike  of  the  core-makers  and  about  the  girl  Bailey  had  spoken 
of  as  dynamite.  "She  upset  Greg,  too,"  his  mother  observed, 


RIYERDALE  .7.1 

"though,  of  course,  he  wouldn't  admit  it.  She  must  be  worth 
seeing." 

"Was  that  the  girl,"  Hugh  wanted  to  know,  "who  was  ar 
rested  and  fined  and  said  we'd  tried  to  kidnap  her?" 

"That  was  a  fat-witted  performance,"  his  mother  said,  an 
swering  his  question  at  the  same  time  with  a  nod.  "A  job  like 
that  wants  doing  thoroughly  if  it's  to  be  done  at  all.  These 
Napoleonic  men  who  come  up  and  give  somebody  a  slap  on  the 
wrist !  If  I'd  been  seeing  to  her  she  wouldn't  have  needed  any 
more  seeing  to  for  a  long  time/' 

Hugh  scowled.    "Do  you  mean  we  did  do  it  ?"  he  asked. 

"Oh,  don't  be  an  innocent  lamb!"  said  his  mother.  "Of 
course  we  didn't  do  it.  Why  should  we  hire  a  detective  agency 
like  Bullen  and  O'Hara  if  we  had  to  do  dirty  jobs  like  that 
ourselves  ?  Bullen  bungled  it,  I  suppose.  I  always  said  that 
man  was  a  muff,  back  in  the  days  when  he  was  a  police  cap 
tain." 

"We  hired  it  done,  then,"  said  Hugh ;  then  headed  off  his 
mother's  apparent  intention  to  speak  with  a  curt — "Oh,  don't 
stop  to  poke  me  up  now !  Get  on  and  tell  me  the  rest  of  it." 

Mrs.  Corbett  grinned  contentedly  and  went  at  her  soup  with 
gusto.  It  was  good  to  have  Hugh  home  again.  It  is  worth 
noting  that  she  obeyed  him. 

The  core-makers,  she  said,  did  not  come  back  to  work  on 
Tuesday  morning  as  Gregory  had  pretended  to  expect  they 
would.  That  devil  of  a  girl  evidently  had  them  hypnotized. 
At  noon  they  got  the  trimmers  in  the  buggy  factory  to  stay 
out,  too.  But  the  real  trouble  did  not  begin  until  Wednesday, 
when  an  attempt  was  made  to  fill  the  strikers'  places.  Then 
the  molders  struck — "and  being  a  hairy  horny  lot,  they  started 
raising  hell." 

Mrs.  Corbett,  being  Mrs.  Corbett,  paused  appreciatively  over 
this  phrase  and  glanced  over  at  her  son.  Gregory  would  have 
risen  to  it — and  so  would  her  husband — with  a  shrug,  or  an 
uncomfortable  smile.  But  Hugh's  scowling  abstraction  was 
undisturbed. 

"The  brimstone  and  lava  began,  though,  that  night,"  she 


73  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

went  on,  "when  Bobert  had  to  tell  your  grandfather  what  had 
happened." 

This  did  not  penetrate  very  deep  into  Hugh,  either.  "Yes, 
he'd  take  it  pretty  hard,  of  course/'  was  all  he  said. 

His  mother  considered  him  thoughtfully.  Then,  "Why,  you 
miserable  little  whipper-snapper !"  she  boomed,  "what  do  you 
know  about  how  he'd  take  it  ?  What  do  you  know  about  any 
thing — you  or  Greg,  either?  Wait  till  you've  lived  over  a 
thing  for  fifty  years — put  all  your  brains  and  your  back  and 
your  guts  into  it!  Wait  till  you've  lived  through  years  like 
'seventy-seven  and  'ninety-three,  when  you  didn't  know  from 
one  day  to  the  next  whether  you  were  going  to  last  through  or 
not.  Pay-rolls  that  there  wasn't  any  money  to  meet  and  that 
had  to  be  met,  somehow.  He  always  did  meet  them.  Why, 
there  are  men  out  there  now,  talking  this  I-Won't-Work  hog- 
wash  who  never  earned  a  cent  in  their  lives  that  he  didn't  pay 
them.  And  this  is  the  kind  of  gratitude  he  gets !  And  you 
and  the  rest,  that  it's  always  made  comfortable  and  important, 
'supposing  he  would  take  it  hard' !"  And  then  this  amazing 
conclusion.  "You  ought  to  get  married,  Hugh.  That'd  teach 
you  a  few  things  you  ought  to  know." 

Hugh  went  on  eating  steadily  through  what  he  had  on  his 
plate,  and  it  was  not  until  he'd  finished  that  he  answered  his 
mother  at  all.  Then  it  was  only  to  say :  "Oh  yes,  of  course. 
But  that  line  of  thinking  won't  get  us  anywhere  now." 

He  mused  a  while,  then  amplified.  "Something's  happened 
out  there.  Those  people  didn't  strike  and  start  in  raising  hell 
for  nothing.  Nor  because  they're  bad,  wicked  ingrates  either. 
They  aren't  any  wickeder  than  they've  been  for  the  last  forty 
years.  And  moral  attitudinizing  over  them  is  no  more  good 
than  it  would  be  over  a  delirious  man  wrecking  the  furniture. 
What  I'm  going  to  try  to  find  out  is  what  set  'em  off;  what 
they  think  they're  trying  to  do.  If  I  can  manage  to  get  at 
their  side  of  it,  I  bet  I  can  manage  to  quiet  them  down. 
They've  got  a  side,  of  course.  It  must  look  like  something  to 
them.  They  aren't  just  ramping  around  for  fun." 

Then,  with  a  flare  of  passion  in  his  dark  face :    "God !  Why 


73 

didn't  they  give  me  a  chance  at  it  before  it  got  like  this? 
Greg! — Trying  to  keep  me  in  the  dark!  He  ought  to  know 
he's  a  fool  at  this  kind  of  business.  Is  a  fool  not  to." 

He  thrust  back  his  chair  and  got  up.  "I  suppose  there's  a 
car  I  can  have  ?"  he  said. 

"Xothing  but  the  limousine/'  his  mother  informed  him. 
"Your  father's  got  one  and  the  other's  out  at  Riverdale. 
Bemis  can  drive  it,  though." 

"Don't  want  him,"  said  Hugh.    "Drive  myself." 

"Be  easy  with  your  grandfather,"  was  his  mother's  valedic 
tory.  "This  picnic's  likely  to  kill  him  if  you  boys  aren't 
careful." 


CHAPTEE  VI 

IT  was  around  eight  o'clock  when  Hugh  drove  up  to  the 
great  iron  gate  at  the  foot  of  Charles  Street.  Here  he  was 
peremptorily  refused  admittance  by  a  man  who  had  most 
of  his  jaw  on  one  side  of  his  face  and  whose  clothes  were  lurnpy 
with  concealed  weapons.  The  limousine  was  responsible  for 
this  refusal,  or  rather,  the  fact  that  Hugh  was  driving  it  him 
self,  which  gave  him  in  the  guard's  eyes,  the  abhorred  status 
of  a  semi-domestic  employee. 

"Go  down  to  the  door  marked  'office/  around  the  corner.  If 
they  want  this  car  brought  inside  they  can  let  me  know." 

Hugh  could  have  got  the  gate  open,  of  course,  if  there  had 
been  any  point  in  it.  But  there  was  not.  So  he  drove  down 
to  the  door  marked  "office"  and  left  the  car  at  the  curb.  At 
this  door  also  he  was  accosted  by  another  of  those  lumpy, 
serge-suited,  derby-hatted  representatives  of  the  half-law  rec 
ognizable  as  a  private  detective  as  far  as  one  could  see  him. 
This  was  a  more  authoritative  specimen  than  the  other.  He 
inquired  out  of  a  drooping  corner  of  his  mouth  and  skepti 
cally,  about  the  nature  of  Hugh's  business. 

But  one  of  the  old  watchmen  was  on  duty  here,  too,  and  by 
addressing  him  as  Mr.  Corbett,  effected  an  instant  revolution 
in  the  gunman's  attitude. 

Hugh  hated  this  infernal  bonhomie  even  worse  than  the 
fellow's  truculence.  Was  the  whole  place  infested,  he  won 
dered,  with  these  thugs?  He  asked  the  old  watchman  if  he 
happened  to  know  anything  of  Gregory's  whereabouts,  but 
hardly  waited  for  the  answer,  which  was  indeed  negligible, 
before  he  went  on  inside. 

He  found  the  administrative  offices  up-stairs  all  deserted 
and  so  walked  out  at  random  into  the  plant.  He  found  here 
the  same  atmosphere  he  had  noted  about  the  streets  of  the 
town  he  had  driven  through  on  his  way  to  the  works — a  super- 

74 


EIVERDALE  75 

ficial  quiet,  with  a  heaving  ground-swell  of  restlessness  under 
neath.  Xothing  that  he  saw  was  running,  though  lights  were 
on  everywhere,  and  he  kept  encountering  groups  of  men — 
some  of  them  regular  employees,  but  many  more — an  aston 
ishingly  large  number — who  obviously  were  not.  There  was 
no  fusion  between  the  groups  of  regular  workmen — the  loyal 
ists  among  their  own  people — and  the  Hessian  gangs  of  mer 
cenaries  who  had  been  brought  in  to  break  the  strike. 

The  former  were  moody,  silent;  fell  silent  at  any  rate, 
when  he  approached,  and  showed  a  marked  indisposition  to 
recognize  him,  though  they  were  mostly  men  he  knew.  The 
others,  the  strike-breakers,  seemed  to  be  trying  to  pump  up 
a  swagger;  made  a  lot  of  empty  noise.  A  group  of  half  a 
hundred  of  them  in  one  of  the  courts  was  trying  to  learn 
from  one  of  their  number  a  ribald  song  with  which,  on  se 
lected  phrases  of  particularly  pleasing  obscenity,  they  made 
the  walls  ring. 

It  was  after  half  an  hour's  wandering  that  he  found  his 
grandfather  over  in  a  just-completed  building  designed  for  a 
machine-shop,  but  not  yet  in  service.  Its  vast,  unoccupied 
area  fitted  it  for  just  the  use  old  Gregory  meant  to  put  it  to 
-• — that  of  dormitory  and  mess-hall.  Hundreds  of  cots  were 
already  lined  up  along  its  bays.  More  of  them  were  con 
stantly  being  brought  in.  And  in  the  center  men  were  knock 
ing  up  benches  and  laying  planks  on  trestles  for  tables.  Down 
at  one  end  they  were  installing  a  kitchen.  Old  Gregory,  ap 
parently  on  a  round  of  the  plant,  was  here  questioning  the 
men  in  charge  and  ordering  changes  made  in  cases  where  the 
existing  arrangements  failed  to  satisfy  him. 

The  sight  of  Hugh  seemed  to  please  him.  He  said,  "So 
you're  back,  eh,"  and  reaching  out  a  hand  grasped  his  grand 
son's  shoulder  with  it.  Then  he  went  on  telling  the  man  he 
was  talking  to  what  he  wanted  and  why. 

His  appearance  and  manner,  especially  in  the  light  of  MTS. 
Corbetfs  warning,  amazed  Hugh.  Here  was  a  man,  whom  the 
memories  of  his  boyhood  hardly  reached  back  to — a  man 
old  Gregory  had  not  been  for  at  least  a  score  of  years — poised, 
frictionless,  absolutely  in  command  of  himself  and  of  every 


76  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

one  about  him.  The  violence,  the  senile  wilfulness,  whicK 
had  imposed  upon  the  family  a  definite  method  of  treating 
him,  all  were  gone.  Just  the  way  he  stood  there,  with  an  un 
finished  wagon  spoke  he  had  picked  up  on  his  rounds  solidly 
grasped  in  one  hand  and  used  to  point  his  orders  with,  showed 
the  difference. 

The  impetus  of  a  notion  Hugh  had  brought  out  to  Eiverdale 
with  him  that  the  thing  to  do  with  his  grandfather  was  to  get 
him  to  go  home  to  bed  and  leave  him  and  Gregory  to  run  the 
show,  at  least  for  over  Sunday,  led  him  to  make  the  suggestion. 

The  old  man  dismissed  it  with  a  smile.  "I'm  all  right," 
he  said.  "And  I'm  worth  the  lot  of  you  at  a  job  like  this." 

He  kept  Hugh  beside  him  until  matters  under  his  eye  were 
arranged  to  his  satisfaction,  and  then  the  two  walked  on  again. 
The  doorway  they  left  the  building  by  happened  to  command 
rather  a  wide  view  of  the  works — an  impressive  view  at  night, 
with  its  perspectives  of  lighted  windows,  its  blackness  of  long 
blank  walls,  its  vastnesses  of  mass  and  distance,  its  huge 
irregularities  of  outline.  The  old  man,  his  arm  in  Hugh's, 
stood  still  for  a  moment  looking  at  it. 

"I've  had  many  a  battle  for  this,"  he  said,  "but  never  one 
just  like  this  one.  I  never  thought  to  have.  But  we're  going 
to  see  it  through,  and  we're  going  to  win  out.  They'll  find 
I've  got  one  more  fight  in  me  yet." 

They  walked  on  again  in  silence,  for  Hugh  couldn't  think 
of  an  answer.  Presently  his  grandfather  said : 

"You  were  on  the  wrong  tack.  You're  not  to  blame.  I  told 
yon  to  go  ahead;  didn't  realize  that  this  was  just  what  it 
was  coming  to.  But  if  you've  learned  your  lesson  from  it, 
it's  worth  all  it  costs."  He  broke  off  to  say  "Hello,  Charlie !" 
to  a  man  in  working  clothes,  whom  the  illumination  of  an  arc- 
lamp-overhead  enabled  him  to  recognize. 

Hugh  recognized  him,  too.  He  was  a  man  whose  job  was 
the  cold-shrinking  of  steel  tires  on  wagon  wheels.  He  said, 
"Good  evening,  Mr.  Corbett,"  hesitated,  let  them  go  by,  and 
then  came  hurrying  after  them.  He  spoke  with  evident  per 
turbation  and  distress. 

"Mr.  Corbett,"  he  said,  "couldn't  you  let  me  off?    It's  the 


RIVERDALE  77 

wife  and  girl  I'm  worrying  about.  I  can't  find  out  what's 
happening  to  them  shut  up  in  here.  And  the  strikers  are 
getting  pretty  fierce.  It's  scabs  they're  calling  us.  I  don't 
want  to  make  you  any  more  trouble,  but  .  .  ." 

"But  you  want  the  smooth  and  none  of  the  rough,"  old 
Mr.  Corbett  finished  the  sentence  for  him.  "You  want  your 
wages,  but  you  don't  want  to  fight.  I've  fed  you  and  kept  a 
roof  over  your  head  for  twenty-five  years  and  now  we're  in 
trouble,  you  want  to  go  home." 

Hugh  understood  now  why  men  feared  his  grandfather. 
There  was  something  really  terrible  about  the  cold  anger  that 
rang  in  that  voice.  He  didn't  wonder  the  man  cringed. 

"There  are  just  two  kinds  of  men,  from  now  on,"  old  Greg 
ory  continued.  "The  men  who  stood  by  me  and  the  men  who 
went  against  me.  I'll  never  forget  which  is  which.  I'll  see 
that  you  get  out  of  the  gate  if  you  want  to  go,  but  if  you  do 
go,  by  God,  you'll  never  come  back. — Well,  which  is  it  ?" 

The  man  hesitated  and  in  that  hesitation  old  Gregory  road 
his  answer.  He  turned  to  Hugh. 

"Take  this  yellow  dog  to  the  gate,"  he  commanded,  "and 
see  that  they  let  him  out." 

Hugh  obeyed  the  order  without  protesting  to  his  grand 
father  and  without  a  word  to  the  man.  But  coming  back  from 
the  gate  he  set  out  to  find — not  the  elder  Gregory,  but  his 
young  namesake.  A  talk  with  this  brother  of  his  had  become 
a  thing  that  could  not  be  put  off  any  longer. 

He  tried  Greg's  office  first  and  was  lucky  enough  to  find 
him  there  busy  with  the  telephone.  Greg,  greeting  him  with  a 
good-humored  wave  of  the  hand  and  with  the  divided  atten 
tion  of  one  waiting  for  the  voice  he  wants  in  the  receiver, 
said: 

"So  you've  come  back.  I  suppose  you  read  about  our  party 
in  the  papers." 

"Yes,"  Hugh  said,  "that's  how  I  heard  about  it." 

"Didn't  have  time,"  said  Gregory,  "to  send  out  a  tracer 
after  you.  Hell  began  popping  all  at  once."  Then,  into  the 
telephone,  "Hello !  Bullen  and  O'Hara?  .  .  .  Corbett 
speaking.  Are  you  sending  us  any  more  to-night?  .  .  . 


78  AN   AMEKICAN   FAMILY 

All  right.  .  .  .  Three  truckloads  to-morrow,  eh?  .  .  , 
Yes,  everything's  quiet  here  in  the  plant.  It's  a  little  early 
yet  for  them  to  be  starting  anything  outside  .  .  ,  Yes, 
that's  all  understood.  Good-by." 

He  hung  up  the  receiver  and  turned  back  to  Hugh.  "It's  been 
hot  out  here  for  three  days,  but  I  think  we've  got  it  pretty 
well  in  hand  now.  Grandfather's  a  wonder.  Have  you  seen 
him  ?  He's  really  enjoying  it  in  a  way ;  years  younger  than 
I  can  remember  him.  But  too  much  of  it  wouldn't  be  good 
for  him  and  he's  had  about  enough  now.  I  wish  you'd  take 
him  home.  There's  nothing  more  to  do  out  here  to-night, 
though  I've  got  to  stick  around  in  case  of  anything  turn 
ing  up." 

"What  do  you  mean  by  'having  it  well  in  hand'?"  Hugh 
asked.  "Do  you  know  what  it's  all  about — what  they're  strik 
ing  for — what  it  was  started  them  off?  Have  you  any  plans 
for  settling  the  thing?" 

"We've  all  the  plans  we  need,"  Greg  answered  grimly. 
"We're  going  to  fight  it  out  on  this  line  till  they  get  a  bellyful 
— and  then  some  more.  They  started  it.  Now  they  can  stew 
in  their  own  juice.  Nobody  knows  what  they  want,  themselves 
least  of  all.  And  as  to  what  it  was  that  started  them  off 
.  .  .  !"  He  broke  off  with  a  shrug;  then  added,  "Oh, 
there's  no  good  going  into  that  now.  You  don't  get  anything 
by  crying  over  spilled  milk — even  when  you've  thought  for 
a  good  while  that  some  of  it  was  going  to  be  spilled." 

"Meaning  to  say,"  Hugh  interpreted,  not  interrogatively, 
"that  it's  my  damned  'welfare'  nonsense  that's  at  the  bottom 
of  the  whole  thing." 

"Why,  if  you  want  it  straight,"  said  Gregory,  "yes." 

"You  haven't  made  any  attempt,  then,"  Hugh  went  on,  "to 
find  out  what  it  was  they  wanted  ?  Haven't  talked  with  any 
of  them,  I  suppose?  All  you've  done  is  to  hook  up  with  a 
sweet  pair  of  crooks  like  Bullen  and  O'Hara;  get  them  to 
send  you  a  lot  of  strike-breakers  and  rifles,  and  pull  off  a 
little  kidnaping  for  you  on  the  side." 

"Keep  your  temper,"  said  Greg  shortly.  "They're  a  per 
fectly  reputable  detective  agency,  in  the  first  place,  and  in  the 


EIVERDALE  79 

second,  we  didn't — as  you  say — hook  up  with  them  when  this 
thing  broke.  We've  had  them  retained  for  years,  to  keep  a 
general  eye  on  things." 

"Spies,  you  mean  ?"  Hugh  broke  in ;  "planted  all  over  the 
place?  I  never  was  told  we  had  any  system  like  that.  Fd 
like  to  know  why  I  was  kept  in  the  dark  about  it." 

"I  suppose,"  his  brother  said,  "because  it  wouldn't  occur  to 
anybody  that  you'd  need  to  be  told  an  elementary  thing  like 
that.  It  offends  your — highbrow  notions,  naturally,  but  it's 
a  system  that's  in  almost  universal  practise — and  it's  been 
found  to  work." 

Hugh  made  no  immediate  reply.  Just  sat  there,  his  dark 
face  staring  down  at  the  desk-blotter,  during  the  little  silence 
that  followed  Gregory's  words.  The  elder  brother  glanced 
over  at  him  and  felt  a  sharp  compunction  for  that  sneering 
word  "highbrow."  He  attempted  an  apology — a  dangerous 
thing  for  a  man  to  do  when  he's  been  without  sleep  for  forty- 
eight  hours  as  Gregory  had  been. 

"I  didn't  mean  to  start  anything,"  he  said.  "I  shouldn't 
have  taken  that  tone.  Only"— that  fatal  "only" !— "only  you 
haven't  been  out  here,  and  you  don't  know  anything  about  it, 
and  it  has  been  hotter  than  hell,  and  when  you  sit  around 
talking  about  finding  out  what  they  want — giving  them  what 
they  want  is  what  you  mean,  I  suppose — tucking  them  up 
and  kissing  them  all  good  night, — why,  it  makes  me  tired.  It 
happens  to  be  a  case  where  rose-water  and  powder-puff  meth 
ods  won't  work.  And  ours  will." 

"They  won't,"  said  Hugh,  lounging  to  his  feet.  "They 
haven't  from  the  start.  You  say  I  haven't  been  here  and  don't 
know  anything  about  it.  Well,  that  wasn't  my  fault.  You 
were  glad  to  have  me  out  of  the  way,  I  suspect.  But  how  much 
did  you  know  about  it?  How  much  did  your  damned  spies 
bring  you  when  this  thing  was  cooking  up?  It  must  have 
been  cooking  a  good  while.  They  didn't  bring  you  anything. 
You've  admitted  you  were  taken  by  surprise.  And  you've 
made  a  hell  of  a  mess  of  it,  though  you  don't  admit  that. 
Talk  about  'having  it  well  in  hand'  and  'fighting  it  out  on  this 
line'  as  if  you  were  a  tin  general !  What  have  you  got  in 


80  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

hand  ?  You've  got  a  few  hundred  thugs  inside  the  plant  here, 
who  can't  run  it,  and  you've  got  a  few  thousand  good  work 
men  outside  who  could  but  won't.  What  are  you  going  to 
do  with  them  ?  You  can't  mow  them  all  down  with  machine- 
guns.  You  can't  even  move  them  out  of  town  bodily  and  get 
others  to  take  their  places.  You've  got  to  begin  running  the 
plant  again  sometime  and,  on  some  sort  of  terms,  you've  got 
to  run  it  with  them.  The  trouble  with  you  is  you  think  you're 
a  sort  of  medieval  baron  shut  up  in  his  castle.  It's  time 
you  woke  up." 

Matters  had  gone  "beyond  the  conversational  stage  for  Greg 
ory.  The  only  relief  to  his  feelings  would  have  been  blows. 
He  and  Hugh  were  too  old  to  fight  it  out,  as  they  had  fought 
out  the  differences  of  their  boyhood.  So  all  he  said  was : 

"There's  no  use  going  on  with,  this." 

"You're  right  about  that,"  said  Hugh.  "Now  I'll  tell 
you  what  I'm  going  to  do.  I'm  not  in  on  your  plans  and  I 
don't  want  to  be.  I'm  going  outside  the  fence,  altogether,  to 
see  what  I  can  do.  I'll  take  my  rose-water  and  powder-pun: 
with  me.  Good  night." 

Hugh  walked  out  into  the  street  with  no  definite  plan  at 
all,  beyond  the  immediate  one  of  cooling  down  and  getting 
control  of  his  temper.  He  realized  that  he  was  quite  as  much 
to  blame  for  their  quarrel  as  Gregory  had  been.  He  reflected 
that  if  Gregory  had  countered  upon  him  with  a  demand  for 
his  own  solution  of  the  problem  he'd  have  had  him.  But  as 
he  walked  along,  paying  very  little  attention  to  where  he  was 
going,  the  outlines  of  his  plan  came  to  him. 

His  starting  point  was  the  rather  far-fetched  comparison 
which  the  disquieting,  unnatural  condition  of  the  streets  sug 
gested  to  him.  People  were  moving  about  in  them,  but  not  as 
when  they  were  pursuing  their  every-day  affairs.  There  was 
no  laughing,  no  loud  talking.  One  saw  compact  little  groups 
moving  along  as  if  they  were  going  somewhere.  His  exag 
gerated  comparison  was  that  it  must  have  been  like  that  in 
Paris  on  the  eve  of  St.  Bartholomew. 

And  then  suddenly  he  understood  the  astonishing  ferocity 


BIVETCDALE  81 

of  this  strike.  It  was  not  a  war  between  organized  parties. 
There  was  no  distinguishing  between  friend  and  enemy.  Or 
at  least,  friends  and  enemies  were  all  mingled  together,  living 
in  the  same  streets.  It  was  the  chaos  that  was  exciting  every 
body  ;  the  not  knowing  whom  to  count  on. 

There  must  be  hundreds  of  men  outside — why,  thousands 
of  them ! — feeling  much  as  poor  Charlie  felt — not  revolution 
ary  a  bit,  but  coerced  by  the  mob  idea  that  it  was  despicable — 
treacherous — to  work  for  Corbett.  What  fed  the  blaze  was 
the  sight  of  those  guarded  gates  and  the  knowledge  that  be 
hind  them  men  went  on  working  for  Corbett;  profiting  at 
the  expense  of  those  who  had  remained  loyal  to  their  kind. 

Suppose,  then,  that  we  closed  down  the  plant  entirely; 
drew  the  fires;  turned  everybody  out.  "Now,"  suppose  we 
said,  "talk  it  out  among  yourselves.  Hold  meetings.  Decide 
what  your  grievances  are.  Send  us  a  committee  with  a  propo 
sition.  If  we  like  it  we'll  open  up  the  works  again.  If  we 
don't  we'll  tell  you  why.  In  the  meantime — for  the  present, 
anyway  (Hugh  smiled  over  this  notion),  the  Company  Stores 
will  go  on  giving  credit.  We  don't  want  to  starve  you  into  a 
decision." 

Wouldn't  that— or  something  like  it— work?  Wouldn't  the 
bitterness  boil  out,  the  effervescence  foam  away,  the  sober  ma 
jority — the  overwhelming  majority,  Hugh  believed — among 
the  men  themselves  suppress  the  wild  ones  better  than  Greg 
with  his  riot  guns  and  his  strike-breakers  ? 

The  recollection  of  his  grandfather  and  the  last  words  he 
had  heard  him  say  brought  Hugh  up  short.  "There  are  just 
two  kinds  of  men,  from  now  on.  The  men  who  stood  by  me 
and  the  men  who  went  against  me.  I'll  never  forget  which 
is  which."  A  proposition  like  this  of  his  grandson's  would 
never  get  beyond  his  ears.  The  plant  was  his ;  the  men  were 
his,  loyal  or  disloyal  to  him.  He  had  been  creating,  all  these 
years,  an  enormous  sentimental  credit  account,  in  terms  of 
gratitude,  against  the  plant  and  all  concerned  in  the  operation 
of  it ;  an  account  that  never  could  be  liquidated. 

But  was  it  his?    Could  anything  that  involved  the  lives  of 


83  AX    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

as  many  human  beings  as  this  really  belong — in  that  personal 
sense — to  anybody?  It  was  the  first  time  Hugh  had  ever 
asked  himself  that  question, 

He  was  brought  back  from  this  somewhat  remote  specula 
tion  by  awakening  to  the  fact  that  he  was  drifting  along  with 
an  irregular  stream  of  people  who  were  going  somewhere.  It 
struck  him  now  that  now  and  again  the  members  of  some 
group  overtaking  him  had  noted  his  presence  curiously — 
pointed  him  out  to  each  other.  Well,  he'd  go  along  and  see 
what  their  objective  was. 

Then  the  stream  thickened  suddenly.  A  crowd  debouched 
out  of  a  cross  street  and  massed  back  upon  the  sidewalks, 
leaving  the  roadway  clear.  Down  the  street  were  lights  and 
cheering.  As  the  procession  itself — if  one  could  call  a  dem 
onstration  so  little  organized  and  with  so  little  of  rank  and 
file  about  it  by  that  name — came  in  sight,  Hugh  saw  that  they 
were  carrying  transparencies  lettered  in  red  and,  save  for  an 
occasional  simple  slogan  like  DOWN  WITH  WAGE 
SLAVERY,  generally  illegible  from  an  attempt  to  say  too 
much.  He  saw  occasional  red  flags.  There  were  sporadic 
attempts  to  sing  The  Marseillaise.  But  none  of  these  manifes 
tations  impressed  Hugh  very  much.  The  manifestants  were 
just  a  trifle  shamefaced;  self-conscious  at  any  rate.  The 
proceeding  had  a  touch  of  the  doctrinaire  about  it.  They  in 
tended  to  be  a  mob,  but,  somehow,  they  weren't — quite. 

In  the  center  of  a  dense  knot  of  men — fifty  of  them,  per 
haps,  and  evidently  picked  for  their  great  size  and  strength — 
was  a  girl,  her  head  and  shoulders  easily  visible  above  theirs 
in  the  light  of  two  flaring  gasoline  torches.  She  was  riding 
on  something  and  as  she  went  by  he  made  out  what  it  was — 
an  old-fashioned,  high-wheeled  sulky.  Whereupon  his  memory  . 
automatically  registered  a  similar  vehicle — could  it  by  any 
fantastic  possibility  be  the  same  one? — that  once  had  stood 
about  in  a  corner  of  their  stable,  hallowed  by  the  legend  that 
his  grandfather  used  to  drive  it,  down  in  the  old  Washington 
Park  track. 

Possibly  the  evocation  of  that  quaint  memory  of  his  had 
something  to  do  with  the  ironic  detachment  with  which  he 


EIVERDALE  83 

looked  at  the  girl.  Her  position  there,  with  that  burly  body 
guard  around  her  and  the  cheers  with  which  she  was  greeted, 
made  it  clear  enough  not  only  that  she  was  the  girl  they  had 
unsuccessfully  attempted  to  kidnap  two  or  three  days  before, 
but  that  she  really  was  one  of  the  exciting  causes,  if  not  the 
chief  exciting  cause,  of  the  strike.  Greg's  frantic  exaspera 
tion  over  her  was  not  surprising.  And  yet,  how  absurd  it 
was  to  try  to  train  their  heavy  artillery  on  a  wild  young  will- 
o'-wisp  like  that!  She  was  the  torch,  no  doubt;  but  what 
really  makes  the  explosion  is  the  powder. 

Hugh's  thoughtful  smile  as  she  went  "by,  mingled  apprecia 
tion  with  pity.  She  was  a  thriller,  all  right.  He  could  see 
why  she  excited  the  crowd.  There  was  a  sort  of  splendor 
about  her,  of  courage,  of  high  adventure.  He  rejected  the  word 
"devoted"  as  implying  submission  to  a  sense  of  duty — to  some 
imperative  obligation.  This  girl  looked  as  if  she  had  never 
submitted  to  anything.  She  believed,  no  doubt — riding  along 
like  that — that  she  was  experiencing  the  sensations  of  another 
Joan  of  Arc.  But  Hugh  felt  pretty  sure  she  was  mistaken. 
She  had  the  power  simply  of  radiating  herself,  and  she  got  an 
ecstasy  out  of  the  act. 

He  didn't  believe  that  she  was  very  important — to  him,  un 
less,  somehow,  she  could  be  persuaded  to  help  him  understand 
what  the  deep  bitter  grievance  was — really  was — that  her 
fires  had  lighted.  If  he  could  once  get  at  that  and  neutralize 
it,  then  the  firebrands  could  go  as  far  as  they  liked.  They'd 
never  succeed  in  setting  off  another  explosion. 

While  he  stood  debating  whether  to  follow  the  crowd  along 
to  the  meeting  or  not,  a  man  who  had  been  standing  back  in 
one  of  the  dooryards  while  the  procession  went  by,  came  up 
for  a  look;  then,  with  an  air  of  surprise  and  satisfaction, 
spoke  to  him. 

"Good  evening,  Mr.  Corbett,"  he  said,  and  on  Hugh's  ac 
knowledging  the  salutation,  added:  "My  name's  Paddock. 
I'm  with  Bullen  and  O'Hara.  You  don't  need  to  worry  any 
more  about  that  skirt.  We  missed  her  the  last  time,  but  to 
night  we're  going  to  get  her  sure/' 

"She  looked  pretty  well  guarded  to  me,"  said  Hugh. 


84  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

Paddock  grunted  contemptuously,  glanced  around,  and  low 
ering  his  voice  to  the  most  intimately  confidential  pitch,  he 
added,  "About  half  that  guard  of  hers  is  phony.  Our  own 
people.  Some  of  the  best  we've  got.  There'll  be  nothing  to 
it.  When  the  meeting's  over,  we'll  run  her  off  as  slick  as 
grease." 

Hugh  asked,  "What  are  you  going  to  do  with  her  when  you 
get  her?" 

Paddock  said  this  was  easy.  They  would  take  her  in  to 
Chicago  and  have  her  locked  up  in  one  of  the  police  stations, 
but  not  booked.  By  shuffling  her  about  from  one  station  to 
another,  they'd  be  able  to  evade  the  service  of  a  writ  of  habeas 
corpus  and  hold  her  almost  indefinitely.  At  least  until  either 
the  strike  had  quieted  down,  or  they  could  find  some  charge 
that  would  give  them  a  legal  right  to  hold  her.  It  was  the  only 
way  to  deal  with  these  bums,  Paddock  thought. 

Hugh  asked  him  where  the  meeting  was  to  be  held  and  got 
a  few  unsolicited  details  as  to  the  manner  in  which  the  kid 
naping  was  to  be  conducted.  Then,  with  the  speculation  that  he 
guessed  he'd  better  be  getting  on,  Paddock  took  his  leave, 
utterly  unconscious  of  the  seething  volcano  whose  crater-rim 
his  thick  feet  had  been  treacling. 

Hugh  was  in  a  white  rage.  He  had  been  stoked  up  to  it, 
one  might  almost  say,  scientifically,  during  the  nine  hours 
that  had  elapsed  since  he  read  of  the  strike  down  there  in 
Toledo.  His  mother,  his  grandfather,  the  strike-breakers, 
Gregory,  and  the  girl  herself,  each  had  contributed  something. 
This  loathsome  private  detective  with  his  whisky-saturated 
breath,  and  his  husky  whisperings,  applied  the  blow-pipe  for 
the  last  time. 

Hugh  let  him  walk  away  before  he  stirred,  then  set  out  in 
the  opposite  direction,  for  the  office,  feeling  very  light-footed, 
very  confident — completely  irresistible.  Nothing  to  question 
or  to  hesitate  about,  nothing  to  consider,  no  pros  and  cons  to 
weigh: — just  a  magnificent  determination  to  blow  this  silly 
conspiracy  to  bits. 

A  white  rage  like  that  is  likely  to  turn  out  expensive.  There 
{ire  no  brakes  in  its  simple  mechanism,  and  it  often  smashes 


KIVERDALE  85 

through  more  than  its  immediate  objective  before  it  stops. 
But  it  is  thoroughly  enjoyable  while  it  lasts. 

Hugh  noted,  with  satisfaction,  when  he  turned  in  at  the 
office  door,  that  the  limousine  still  stood  at  the  curb.  He  went 
straight  up  to  Gregory's  office,  but  found  no  one  there.  He 
seated  himself  comfortably  at  his  brother's  desk,  looked  at 
his  watch,  and  decided  to  allow  him  twenty  minutes.  If  Greg 
came  back  in  that  time,  he'd  get  an  oral  explanation  of  what 
was  going  to  happen.  Against  the  possibility  of  his  not  com 
ing,  Hugh  wrote  a  note  three  lines  long,  as  follows : 

"Dear  Greg:— 

"I  have  just  stumbled  upon  another  kidnaping  project  of 
your  imbecile  detectives.  I  am  off  to  break  it  up.  Sorry  you 
aren't  here  to  come  along  and  help.  HUGH. 

"P.  S.    Not  that  I  need  any/' 

At  the  expiration  of  the  twenty  minutes  he  went  down 
stairs  again  and  found,  at  his  post  just  inside  the  street  door, 
the  authoritative  detective,  now  in  his  shirt-sleeves,  his  derby 
hat  over  his  eyes,  his  feet  on  the  desk.  He  took  them  down, 
however,  and  stood  up  when  he  saw  that  Hugh  meant  to  speak 
to  him. 

"I  want  a  chauffeur,"  Hugh  said;  "one  of  your  men  who 
can  drive  that  car  out  there  for  me.  I  want  him  put  under 
my  orders  absolutely.  Attend  to  it  as  quickly  as  you  can, 
will  you?" 

The  detective  would  probably  have  obeyed  Hugh's  manner, 
even  if  he  had  not  had  him  identified  as  a  Corbett.  With  the 
magic  of  that  name  added  to  his  inducements  for  zeal,  he  sur 
passed  himself. 

It  wasn't  five  minutes  before  he  had  just  the  man  Hugh 
wanted,  able  to  drive  that  make  of  car — "through  hell,"  of 
course.  All  that  was  needed  was  Mr.  Corbett's  word. 

Hugh  asked  curtly,  "Who's  in  charge  of  that  business  after 
the  meeting — Paddock  ?" 

The  detective  looked  a  little  surprised.  He  said  "Yes,  sir," 
promptly  enough,  but  appeared  to  feel  that  he  was  entitled  to 


86  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

some  explanation  of  the  question.  He  got  none;  and  Hugh 
addressed  his  orders  to  the  chauffeur  through  the  speaking 
tuhe  after  he  had  got  inside  the  car  and  shut  the  door. 

Considering  the  alternative  possibility  of  a  really  murderous 
fight,  Paddock  may  be  said  to  have  accomplished  his  boast  that 
the  kidnaping  would  be  run  off  slick  as  grease.  Two  of  the 
girl's  loyal  guards  had  to  be  slugged  with  brass  knuckles,  but 
matters  had  been  so  deftly  arranged  that  these  were  the  only 
two  anywhere  near  her  when  the  job  was  done.  All  the  others 
drew  their  pay  from  Bullen  and  O'Hara. 

The  girl  herself  was  fairly  at  the  door  of  Hugh's  limousine 
before  she  suspected  the  nature  of  the  event.  Her  realization 
of  something  contrary  to  her  calculations  was  simultaneous, 
indeed,  with  Paddock's.  For  it  was  in  the  same  instant  that 
a  thick  hand  was  clapped  over  the  girl's  mouth  to  cut  off  a 
scream  and  that  Paddock,  with  a  gasp  at  the  sight  of  a  dif 
ferent  car  than  the  one  he  had  expected  at  the  rendezvous, 
said,  "What  the  hell  .  .  .  ?" 

Hugh  stepped  out  of  the  car  to  confront  the  glare  of  an 
electric  torch. 

"It's  all  right,  Paddock/'  he  said.    "Put  her  in." 

Paddock's  wits  were  completely  stalled  by  this  emergency, 
and  he  gave  no  order.  But  the  two  men  who  were  holding  the 
girl  obeyed  Hugh.  This  was  the  sort  of  job  that,  naturally, 
they  wanted  done,  one  way  or  another,  as  quickly  as  possible ; 
since  if  they  should  be  caught  red-handed  in  an  attempt  like 
this,  they  could  hardly  hope  to  get  off  with  their  lives. 

Hugh  snatched  one  of  them  bodily  out  of  the  way  and 
sprang  in  himself  through  the  near  door  in  time  to  pull  the 
girl  away  from  the  other,  which  she  was  frantically  attempting 
to  open.  And  he,  too,  cut  off  a  scream  by  clapping  his  hand 
over  her  mouth.  Then  he  turned  upon  Paddock,  now  suffi 
ciently  out  of  his  daze  to  try  to  get  into  the  car. 

"Don't  want  you,"  Hugh  said.  "You  muffed  it  the  other 
time.  I'm  running  this  show  myself.  Tell  the  man  to 
drive  on." 

Paddock  dropped  sullenly  off  the  running-board,  slammed 
the  door  and  transmitted  the  order  to  the  chauffeur.  He  could 


EIVERDALE  87 

not  Have  disobeyed  any  man  generating  as  much  human  elec 
tricity  as  Hugh,  in  that  fine  white  rage  of  his,  was  generating 
— let  alone  a  man  bearing  the  name  of  Corbett.  He  enter 
tained  a  painful  misgiving,  to  be  sure,  that  he  would  get  hell 
for  this  from  his  immediate  employers,  but  it  was  somewhat 
quieted  oy  the  obvious  good  faith  of  the  struggle  the  girl  was 
making  against  her  new  captor.  He  stood  staring  after  the 
car  for  a  moment  as  it  leaped  away,  then  after  a  sigh  in  which 
relief  and  perplexity  were  equally  blended,  he  said,  with  a 
feeble  attempt  to  recapture  his  lost  authority: 

"All  right,  boys.     Scatter/' 

In  the  car  the  girl  was  fighting  like  a  wildcat.  She  had 
her  teeth  in  the  hand  that  was  clapped  over  her  mouth,  and 
her  chin  was  wet  with  the  blood  from  it,  when  he  said : 

"Those  guards  of  yours  were  private  detectives  trying  to 
kidnap  you.  You're  free  now.  I  took  you  away  from  them. 
Do  you  understand?  This  car  will  take  you  wherever  you 
want  to  go.  Or  you  can  stop  it  and  get  out  any  minute." 
Then  he  released  his  hold  of  her  all  at  once. 

It  was  seconds  after  that  before  she  let  go  his  hand.  Then, 
with  a  sick  limp  revulsion,  she  slumped  down  in  her  corner  of 
the  seat.  Hugh  dropped  back  into  his,  methodically  bound  up 
his  mangled  fingers  in  a  handkerchief,  and  presently  offered 
a  spare  one  that  he  had  to  the  girl. 

"Sometime,"  he  said,  " — not  to-night,  of  course,  unless  you 
happen  to  feel  like  it — I'd  like  to  talk  the  whole  business  out 
with  you.  I'm  Hugh  Corbett." 


CHAPTER  YII 

IN  all  her  life — and  it  had  been  a  variegated  one — Helena 
Galicz  had  never  known  a  moment  so  packed  with  contra 
dictory  emotions  as  this  in  which  the  captor  she  had  been 
fighting  with  the  utmost  fury,  released  her,  told  her  she  was 
free,  and  announced  his  name  as  that  of  her  arch-enemies,  the 
Corbetts. 

Here  was  a  new  sort  of  man — a  man  who  fitted  into  none 
of  her  categories.  It  was  not  so  much  that  he,  of  the  enemy's 
camp,  had  rescued  her  from  his  own  mercenaries.  That  might 
well  enough  be  a  trick.  But  that  a  man  who  could  hold  her 
fast  like  that,  keep  his  hand  pressed  down  over  her  mouth 
while  her  teeth  were  tearing  the  flesh  of  it,  should  be  capable 
of  letting  her  go  without  a  reprisal  either  of  anger  or  of  lust 
— of  speaking  to  her,  kindly  and  reassuringly,  expressing  the 
wish,  subject  to  her  convenience  and  inclination,  to  talk  things 
out  with  her — was  only  a  little  short  of  stupefying.  A  soft 
man  could  not  have  conquered  her.  A  hard  man,  having  con 
quered,  would  have  wreaked  his  victory  upon  her  in  one  way — 
or  the  other.  What  sort  of  man  was  this?  Was  he  human? 
Yes,  he  was.  Her  body  had  been  powerless  in  his  grip,  the 
taste  of  his  blood  was  still  in  her  mouth.  He  was  an  aristo 
crat.  She  knew  the  breed  as  only  long-subjugated  races  can 
know  it.  The  voice  in  which  he  had  dismissed  that  beast  of 
a  detective  was  the  voice  of  one  entitled  to  command. 

She  flashed  around  and  stared  at  him  when  he  told  her  he 
was  Hugh  Corbett,  whereupon  he  added  with  a  short  laugh : 

"Oh,  we're  not  monsters,  really.  Though  this  sort  of  a 
thing  must  make  us  seem  like  that.  You're  perfectly  free  now 
to  go  wherever  you  like.  And  I  think  I  can  promise  that  you 
won't  be  molested  again." 

To  evidence  his  good  faith,  he  picked  up  the  speaking-tube 
and  ordered  the  chauffeur  to  stop  the  car. 

88 


EIVERDALE  89 

Instantly  the  suspicion  flamed  up  in  her  mind  that  here  was 
a  trick — a  plant.  She  was  to  be  seen  by  somebody  getting  out 
of  the  Corbetts'  limousine  in  company  with  young  Hugh 
Corbett.  The  incident  would  be  elaborated — perverted — in 
dustriously  spread  about,  in  the  endeavor  to  undermine  her 
influence  with  the  strikers. 

It  flashed  through  her  mind  so-  quickly — less  a  logical 
process  of  thought  than  a  thing  seen  complete  in  a  single 
glance — that  she  had  time  to  say,  "No,  I  won't  get  out  here, 
unless  you  pull  me  out,"  before  the  speed  of  the  car,  in  re 
sponse  to  Hugh's  order,  had  sensibly  diminished. 

He  countermanded  the  order  at  once  and,  in  a  tone  of  per 
plexity  that  Helena  found  it  difficult  to  doubt  the  genuineness 
of,  asked,  "What  can  I  do  for  you  then?  Where  can  I  take 
you?  If  you'll  tell  me  where  you  live,  or  where  you'll  find 
friends  that  you  can  count  on  ...  ?" 

She  laughed — not  quite  inaudibly.  Could  he  possibly  be 
so  simple  as  to  think  she  would  permit  herself  to  be  turned 
over  to  her  friends  at  his  hands — to  come  driving  up  in  a  car 
like  that,  under  his  escort,  either  to  the  house  where  she 
roomed  or  to  the  vacant  store  they  used  for  Strike  Head 
quarters?  Did  he  think  she  was  a  fool?  Or  was  he?  It 
angered  her  that  she  could  not  make  either  of  these  alterna 
tives  stick. 

He  was  waiting,  speaking-tube  in  hand,  for  her  answer. 
She  glanced  out  the  window.  It  was  a  dark  gloomy  part  of 
town.  The  street  was  deserted.  The  point  at  which  he  had 
ordered  the  car  to  stop  was  already  half  a  mile  past;  the 
frame-up — if  it  had  been  a  frame-up — frustrated.  She  could 
get  out  here  safely  enough.  And  that  would  be,  probably,  the 
wisest  thing  to  do. 

But  it  was  not  what  she  wanted  to  do.  She  did  not  want 
to  leave  him  just  yet.  There  was  the  fascination  of  the  mys 
terious,  for  one  thing.  As  yet,  this  ride  of  hers  was  an  un 
completed  adventure.  Where  would  it  carry  her?  What 
would  he  try  to  do  with  her?  There  was  a  strong  sensuous 
pleasure,  besides,  just  in  riding  along  with  him  like  this;  in 
the  smooth  powerful  motion,  the  relaxation,  which  the  luxuri- 


90  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

cms  upholstery  of  the  car  invited ;  in  the  occasional  fortuitous 
contacts  with  that  fine-limbed,  highly  organized  body  of  his. 
There  was  something  dramatically  satisfactory,  too,  in  this 
calm  after  the  passionate,  furious  struggle  with  which  their 
ride  had  begun. 

She  knew  she  was  playing  with  fire  when  she  said :  "Drive 
me  back  into  Chicago  with  you."  But  then,  Helena  Galicz 
had  been  playing  with  fire  all  her  life. 

It  was  possible,  of  course,  to  give  her  decision  the  color  of 
good  strategy.  And  this,  with  half-contemptuous  insincerity, 
she  did.  The  strikers  must  already  have  suspected  that  she 
had  been  kidnaped  again,  and  this  suspicion  spreading  un- 
contradicted  through  the  night,  would  inflame  them  more  than 
her  presence  could  do.  And  when  they  learned,  upon  her  re 
appearance  in  the  morning,  that  her  abductor  was  one  of  the 
Corbetts  in  person,  the  flames  would  rage  uncontrollably. 

She  heard  then,  down  in  her  depths,  the  premonitory  utter 
ance  of  a  theme  which  was  destined  to  be  the  tragic  one  of  her 
life ;  a  realization  of  how  a  stratagem  like  that  would  appear 
to  him — would  outrage  his  code  of  honor.  Impatiently  she 
silenced  it.  Was  the  warfare  against  his  class,  to  which  she 
had  consecrated  her  life,  to  be  abandoned,  in  any  phase  or 
moment  of  it,  for  the  fetish  of  fair  play  ? 

She  dropped  back  slackly  in  the  cushioned  seat  and  stroked 
her  bruised  lips  with  her  tongue.  They  still  tasted  salt.  He 
was  speaking. 

"That's  very  kind  of  you — to  give  me  a  chance  like  this. 
I  hope  you'll  talk  frankly  with  me.  Frankness  is  a  thing  I've 
found  it  pretty  hard  to  get." 

Her  reply  was  vague,  not  very  intelligible  and  faintly  inter 
rogative.  At  least  he  took  it  that  way  and  began  explaining 
himself:  his  position  in  the  strike;  the  reason  it  came  home 
to  him  as  a  personal  defeat  to  all  his  aims  and  projects;  the 
ineradicable  conviction  he  had  that  the  solvent  for  all  their 
difficulties  was  complete  mutual  understanding.  That  was 
why  it  was  so  maddening  to  see  things  being  done  on  both 
sides  which  darkened  the  issue  instead  of  clearing  it — which 
sowed  distrust  and  hatred.  What  he  wanted  was  to  learn  hew 


RIVERDALB  91 

it  looked  to  the  strikers,  what  their  grievances  were.  His 
side  didn't  mean  to  be  unfair,  let  alone  brutal  and  tyrannous. 
They  might  be  blind — very  likely  were — stupidly  blind — to 
things  they  might  be  expected  to  see.  In  the  course  of  his 
welfare  work  he  had  often  felt  that — been  made  aware  of  re 
sentments  that  no  amount  of  brain-racking  enabled  him  to 
account  for.  But  stupid  though  they  might  be,  and  deplorably 
though  they  might  have  blundered,  they  were  honestly  doing 
the  best  they  could.  He  was  willing  to  concede  that  her  side 
were  honest,  too,  and  prepared  to  be  reasonable — asking  no 
more  than  they  felt  to  be  their  rights.  So  that  if  it  were  pos 
sible  to  get  together  in  a  spirit  of  mutual  forbearance  and  talk 
things  out  to  the  bottom,  quite  frankly,  the  whole  trouble 
might  be  cleared  away. 

Sometimes  the  girl  put  in  a  word  or  two,  for  the  purpose  of 
keeping  him  going.  She  was  not  listening  at  all,  beyond  an 
almost  automatic  identification  of  the  things  he  was  saying  as 
stuff  she  already  knew  by  heart — the  everlasting  righteousness 
of  the  middle-class  point  of  view — the  sense  of  duty — the 
wincing  away  from  the  logical  conclusions  of  the  system  they 
represented — the  milk-and-water  mitigations  they  went  about 
proposing  in  the  wake  of  their  car  of  Juggernaut.  It  was  an 
attitude  that  had  inspired  some  of  the  finest  rhapsodies  of 
hatred  she  had  ever  written. 

To-night,  she  heard  it  calmly,  lying  back  there  among  the 
cushions,  her  arm  touching  his,  his  wounded  hand — the  hand 
that  had  clasped  her  mouth,  lying  there  on  his  knee  before 
her.  The  ideas  he  expressed  were  nothing  to  her;  meant  no 
more  than  the  croak  of  bull-frogs  in  the  marsh  the  road  trav 
ersed. 

But  the  voice  itself  thrilled  her — finely  modulated,  inflected 
in  low-relief,  it  had  a  bead  upon  it  like  champagne.  It  told 
her  that,  calm  as  he  seemed,  dull  as  were  the  things  he  was 
saying,  he  was  excited,  too. 

Deliberately  she  let  her  mind  go  back  to  that  moment  of 
struggle  between  them.  Her  lips  burnt  again  at  the  mem 
ory  of  it. 

The  error  which  all  her  associates  made  when  they  tried  to 


93  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

reckon  with  Helena  Galicz,  lay  in  this:  they  knew — all  the 
radical  world  in  America  knew — that  she  was  Anton  Galicz's 
daughter.  What  they  did  not  know — or,  knowing,  failed  to 
take  account  of — was  the  fact  that  she  was  Helena  Bogany's 
daughter  also. 

Anton  Galicz  had  achieved  martyrdom  in  the  Syndicalist 
cause.  His  trial  for  murder — a  murder  which  it  was  not  even 
contended  had  been  done  by  his  own  hands — had  been  reported 
by  the  Associated  Press,  and  radical  papers  all  over  the  coun 
try  had  rung  with  it.  His  conviction  and  sentence  to  twenty 
years'  hard  labor,  had  been  the  occasion  for  demonstrations 
and  memorials  from  one  coast  of  the  country  to  the  other.  He 
was  the  sort  of  man  who  is  foreordained  to  be  a  martyr  in 
some  cause. 

He  was  an  Austrian  Pole,  a  native  of  the  city  of  Lemburg, 
of  poor  but  not  submerged  parents.  His  frail  body,  no  less 
than  his  active  mind  and  his  early-developed  passion  for  books, 
led  them  to  concentrate  their  hopes  on  him.  Every  advantage 
in  the  way  of  education  that  they  could  possibly  afford,  that 
the  utmost  stretch  of  sacrifice  could  procure,  they  lavished 
upon  him. 

He  made  what  he  could  of  these  advantages,  but  it  was  not 
much.  For  he  was  a  true  intellectual — one  of  those  unfor 
tunates  whose  intelligence  can  see  what  it  is  beyond  their 
energy  to  reach.  Men  like  that  are  doomed  to  live  frustrated, 
disappointed  lives.  They  are  usually  embittered  by  a  convic 
tion  that  the  world  is  not  treating  them  as  well  as  they  de 
serve  to  be  treated.  It  is  the  stupidity  or  malice  of  others,  or 
it  is  a  fundamental  defect  in  the  whole  structure  of  civiliza 
tion  that  prevents  their  attaining  to  the  place  in  the  scheme 
of  tilings  to  which  their  talents  have  entitled  them — rather 
than  their  own  lack  of  character,  energy  or  imagination. 

Up  to  the  time  of  his  emigration  to  America — which  hap 
pened  in  his  early  twenties,  he  attributed  his  failure  and  the 
disappointment  of  his  parents'  hopes,  to  the  aristocrats.  In 
a  democratic  country  like  America,  now,  merit  stood  on  its 
own  feet  and  received  its  merited  rewards.  In  America  a  man 
like  him  would  stand  a  chance.  He  believed  this  and  pro- 


BIVEBDALE  93 

claimed  it  for  a  good  while — for  two  or  three  years — before 
he  finally  arose  and  came. 

America  failed  him.  Its  pretended  democracy  turned  out 
to  be  a  sham.  It  was  the  plutocrats  here,  rather  than  the  aris 
tocrats,  who  ran  things  to  suit  themselves.  But  the  effect  was 
the  same. 

He  was  a  remarkable  polyglot  (he  could  speak  and  write 
with  equal  fluency  in  half  a  dozen  of  the  Eastern  European 
languages,  and  though  his  English  always  had  an  exceedingly 
foreign  sound,  he  was  not  long  in  learning  to  use  it  effectively) 
and  he  managed  to  make  an  exiguous  living,  sometimes  as  a 
reporter  on  one  or  another  of  the  foreign-language  news 
papers,  sometimes  by  acting  as  an  interpreter.  Anyhow,  he 
was  never  quite  reduced  to  unskilled  manual  labor,  though  it 
was  a  prospect  that  never  seemed  very  far  away. 

As  far  back  as  Helena  could  remember,  she  and  her  father 
had  always  been  on  the  move.  Possessions  they  had  never 
had,  beyond  the  clothes  they  wore  and  what  oddments  would 
go  into  a  pair  of  battered  old  hand-satchels  and  a  tin  trunk. 
A  few  months  was  their  limit  in  any  one  domicile.  Jobs,  for 
Anton,  were  like  plums  in  a  bran  pudding  of  joblessness.  That 
they  so  seldom  went  actually  hungry  was  due  to  the  fierce 
practical  wisdom  of  little  Helena,  who  had  developed,  by  the 
time  she  was  seven,  into  a  domestic  autocrat,  impounding  her 
father's  wages,  when  he  was  getting  any,  and  doling  them  out 
by  pennies  when  he  was  not. 

Until  she  was  eleven  }'ears  old  she  went  to  school — on  her  own 
initiative — whenever  she  could,  and  made  astonishing  prog 
ress.  She  lied  to  her  teachers  about  her  age  and  was  supposed 
to  be  thirteen  (she  looked  it,  easily)  when  she  finished  the  sec 
ondary  grades.  All  that  time  they  lived  in  or  about  New 
York. 

She  loved  her  father  dearly,  passionately.  There  was  a 
strain  of  poetic  tenderness  in  his  manner  toward  her  which 
satisfied  all  her  emotional  needs.  He  made,  to  an  extraordi 
nary  degree,  a  companion  of  her — as  his  periods  of  idleness 
made  it  possible  for  him  to  do ;  spent  hours  reading  aloud  to 
her.  It  was  her  good  fortune  that  she  inherited  his  genius  for 


94  AN   AMEEICAN   FAMILY 

languages,  since  he  read  indifferently  in  Kussian,  English, 
German  and  French,  as  if  such  things  as  lingual  boundaries 
did  not  exist — as  if  the  Tower  of  Babel  had  never  been  built. 
And  he  told  her  wonderful  stories.  Until  she  was  twelve  or  so 
she  never  realized  that  she  hadn't  a  mother.  Through  all 
those  years,  though,  her  love  for  him  was  tempered  by  a  feel 
ing  not  far  from  contempt — for  his  idleness,  his  impracti- 
cality,  his  unsuccess. 

But  along  in  her  thirteenth  year  she  had  an  experience 
akin  to  a  religious  conversion.  She  began  listening  to  the  talk 
between  her  father  and  his  friends,  sometimes  in  the  room 
they  happened  to  be  calling  home,  sometimes  around  long 
narrow  tables  behind  saloons,  whither  her  father  had  taken 
her  under  his  arm.  It  had  all  been  noise,  before,  the  growl 
ef  harsh  interminable  voices,  thumps  on  the  table,  cigarette 
and  pipe  smoke — thick  and  hard  to  breathe — the  acrid  smell 
of  stale  beer. 

Suddenly,  one  night,  a  meaning  emerged  out  of  it  all.  They 
were  talking  about  war — war  on  the  capitalist  class ;  the  rich, 
that  meant;  the  men  of  whom  you  had  to  beg  for  jobs  and 
who  gave  them  to  you  on  their  own  brutal  terms;  the  men 
who  had  control  of  the  government  and  ran  it  as  they  pleased 
and  for  their  own  profit;  men  who  lolled  back  in  their  soft 
chairs  and  grinned  as  they  watched  the  workers  sweat  to  pro 
duce  the  wealth  they  grew  fat  upon. 

But  it  was  not  to  last  forever.  Some  day  these  sweating 
workers  would  awake  to  their  own  power.  The  wheels  of 
industry  would  all  stand  still  and  in  that  horrifying,  breath 
less  pause  would  be  heard  the  voice  of  labor — and  it  would  be 
the  voice  of  mastery.  "This  is  the  end,"  it  would  say  to  the 
fat  parasites  in  their  easy  chairs.  "Your  day  is  over.  You 
and  your  wage  systems  and  your  profits  and  the  mask  of 
hypocrisy  you  call  the  State  and  try  to  frighten  us  with  and 
make  us  worship,  are  finished  all  together.  You  can  learn  to 
work  as  we  do  or  you  can  starve  as  you  have  starved  us.  This 
is  a  new  day,  and  all  men  are  free."  And  then  the  workers 
would  take  possession  of  the  tools,  the  factories,  the  locomo 
tives,  the  mines — and  the  new  world  would  be  begun. 


RIVERDALE  95 

The  day  would  not  be  soon,  nor  would  the  prophets  of  it 
walk  an  easy  path.  There  would  be  discouragements,  perse 
cutions  in  the  name  of  that  hated  lie,  the  law ;  the  cause  would 
claim  its  martyrs.  But  it  would  triumph  at  last. 

What  broke  over  her  simultaneously  with  the  vision  itself, 
was  the  realization,  that  among"  the  little  group  of  men  who 
expounded  it,  whose  eyes  gleamed  and  whose  voices  rang  with 
it  around  that  long  table,  her  father  was  the  leader.  The 
others  fell  silent  when  he  spoke — listened,  with  awe,  while  he 
expounded,  or  translated  pamphlets  for  them  from  languages 
they  did  not  know.  It  was  only  when  they  argued  matters  of 
mere  practical  detail,  that  they  ceased  to  defer  to  him.  At 
such  times  his  eyes  grew  dreamy,  his  gaze  abstracted,  and  he 
would  reach  out  with  an  absent  hand  and  fondle  her  hair. 
She  conceived  suddenly  an  enormous  pride  in  him.  All  that 
she  had  hitherto  felt  to  be  his  weaknesses,  underwent  a  trans 
figuration. 

The  physiological  fact  of  her  adolescence  was  at  the  bottom 
of  this,  of  course.  She  needed  something  to  dream  about — a 
religion  to  which  she  could  offer  herself  as  a  sacrifice.  She 
found  it  in  this  Syndicalist  myth  of  the  general  strike.  She 
needed  a  priest  in  whom  she  could  personify  it.  She  found 
him  in  her  father. 

She  soon  became  aware  that  his  companions  were  urging 
him  to  spread  the  gospel  more  widely ;  to  speak  at  little  meet 
ings,  and  to  write  articles  for  some  of  the  radical  weekly  and 
monthly  papers — dingy,  blurred  little  sheets,  enjoying  a  brief 
precarious  existence.  As  best  she  could,  she  made  herself  his 
right  hand.  She  took  care  of  him,  encouraged  and  indulged 
him ;  made  herself  his  pupil,  read  his  pamphlets,  and  brought 
her  difficulties  to  him  for  explanation,  until  he  found  in  her 
the  same  stimulus  those  nightly  gatherings  around  the  long 
table  gave  him. 

All  her  old  ambitions  were  abandoned — of  going  to  high- 
school,  of  getting  a  good  job  in  an  office,  of  wearing  fresh 
laundered  blouses,  of  marrying,  triumphantly,  her  rich  em 
ployer,  and  going  to  theaters  and  restaurants  in  a  low-cut 
gown.  All  these  fancies  were  discarded  like  the  dolls  and  toys 


96  AN   AMElttCAX    FAMILY 

of  infancy.  Her  one  desire  now  was  to  accompany  and  in 
spire  her  father  and  to  learn  enough  from  him  so  that  she 
could,  one  day,  take  the  red  standard  from  his  hand  and 
carry  it  on. 

It  was  in  nineteen  hundred  and  one  that  Anton  and  his 
daughter  made  their  hegira  across  the  continent  to  the  West, 
where,  it  appeared,  better  fields  awaited  their  sowing. 

In  the  East  the  proletariat  was  hopelessly  wedded  to  trade- 
unionism — given  over  to  such  abominations  as  trade-auton 
omy  ;  to  the  belief  that  there  was  common  ground  between  the 
employer  and  the  wage-earner,  and  that  the  Cause  could  be  ad 
vanced  by  seeking  it.  Even  the  Socialists  were  ceasing  to 
be  revolutionaries  and  were  talking  political  action  and  com 
promise.  The  Knights  of  Labor,  who  had  had  the  seed  of 
the  True  Faith  in  them,  were  at  their  last  gasp.  But  in  the 
mining  fields  of  the  great  West,  where  Cceur  d'Alene  had 
not  been  forgotten,  another  leaven  was  working. 

The  journey  west  was  made  by  stages  and  required  months 
for  its  accomplishment.  But  the  goal  was  reached  at  last 
and  the  new  life  begun.  For  three  years  Anton  Galicz 
preached  his  gospel,  where  and  how  he  could,  in  large  towns 
and  small,  in  mining  camps  and  agricultural  communities. 
On  street  corners,  in  tents,  in  dingy,  tight-packed  halls,  he 
proclaimed  his  easily-comprehended  creed.  Wherever  the  in 
dustrial  barometer  was  lowest,  wherever  wisps  of  smoke 
through  the  fissured  crust  of  things  betrayed  a  fire  down  un 
derneath,  there  he  went  and  sought  to  fan  and  release  the 
flames. 

He  had  organized  support,  of  course.  The  Syndicalist 
cause,  although  it  did  not  go  by  that  name,  had  strong  leaders 
and  considerable  funds  behind  it.  But  his  main  support,  that 
he  never  could  have  gone  on  without,  was  his  daughter  Helena. 
Lacking  her,  he  would  have  been  a  mere  dreamer.  And  lacking 
him,  she  .  .  .  Well,  we  are  coming  to  that.  An  amazing 
fact  to  remember  is  that  when  he  went  to  prison  she  was 
still  less  than  seventeen  years  old.  Just  the  age  that  little 
Jean  Gilbert  was  seven  years  later  when  she  caught  her  bur 
glar  and  fell  in  love  with  Hugh. 


BIVEBDALE  97 

It  was  in  the  great  Gold  Creek  strike  that  Galicz  met  his 
fate.  He  was  in  the  thickest  of  it  from  the  beginning.  Its 
enormities  afforded  his  doctrines  a  perfect  object  lesson,  with 
its  bull-pens  and  stockades,  with  labor  openly  taking  up  the 
knife  and  torch,  and  with  the  State  and  the  Law  showing 
their  naked  hands  as  willing  tools  of  the  mine  owners.  The 
issue  was  joined  at  last. 

The  dynamiting  of  a  bunk-house,  in  which  a  mine  boss 
and  a  dozen  strike-breakers  lost  their  lives  was  a  carefully 
planned  and  obviously  conspiratorial  affair,  one  of  many,  but, 
as  it  happened,  the  last.  Law  and  Order  had  already  won 
their  victory  and  were  in  the  mood,  naturally  enough,  to  seek 
out  an  expiatory  victim.  That  Galicz  should  have  been  seized 
and  charged  with  the  murder,  was  also  natural  enough.  The 
actual  perpetrators  of  the  deed  would  probably  never  be  known. 
Galicz,  with  his  perfectly  reckless  talk  and  printed  writings, 
could  be  held  responsible.  In  this  responsibility  others 
shared,  to  be  sure,  but  he  was,  for  a  variety  of  reasons,  con 
spicuous — chiefly  conspicuous  in  that,  among  all  the  leaders, 
he  was  almost  the  only  foreigner.  So,  with  due  process  of 
law,  he  was  seized  and  indicted  and,  after  a  trial,  which 
offered  almost  unexampled  forensic  opportunities  to  the  law 
yers  on  both  sides,  convicted.  His  sentence,  it  was  felt,  in 
view  of  his  fragile  physique  and  feeble  health,  amounted  to 
life  imprisonment. 

So  Anton  Galicz  became  a  martyr.  He  left  in  Helena  a 
living  symbol  of  his  martyrdom.  It  was  as  such  a  symbol 
that  she  lived  during  the  eight  years  which  elapsed  between 
her  father's  going  to  prison  and  the  outbreak  of  the  Corbett 
strike.  Wherever  she  appeared  in  radical  circles,  she  had 
only  to  name  herself  to  be  recognized  as  her  father's  daughter, 
to  receive  sympathy  and  help — to  be  treated  as  a  personage. 

Her  benefactors  and  admirers  turned  up,  too,  in  strange 
places  sometimes.  One  of  the  most  important  of  them  was 
Grace  Drummond,  a  Denver  school-teacher,  with  whom  Helena 
lived  for  more  than  two  years.  She  was  around  forty  years 
old,  unmarried,  good-looking  in  a  repressed,  severely-tailored 
sort  of  way — one  of  that  large  class  among  women  school- 


98  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

teachers,  whose  real  emotional  and  intellectual  life  is  entirely 
an  interior  thing,  dissociated  from,  and  without  any  adequate 
means  of  expression  in,  their  exterior  one;  presenting  to  the 
world  a  finely-chiseled  shell  of  conventionality  which  never 
betrays  the  fires  within.  It  may  be  questioned  in  her  case, 
as  no  doubt  in  many  others,  how  long  those  fires  would  burn 
if  exposed  to  the  wind  of  action  and  of  circumstance.  Pent 
up,  they  seem,  to  the  bearers  of  them,  volcanoes. 

It  was  immediately  after  the  trial  that  Grace  Drummond 
sought  Helena  out  and  carried  her  off  to  the  tiny  apartment 
where  she  lived.  It  was  the  one  act  of  real  self-expression  she 
had  ever  achieved. 

I  wish  that  this  too-crowded  chronicle  afforded  space  for 
telling  more  about  her  and  the  life  that  Helena  lived  with  her. 
But  all  that  must  be  summed  up  in  this  paragraph.  Helena, 
with  that  intense  eager  avidity  which  characterized  her  early 
years,  learned  an  immense  lot  from  the  older  woman ;  learned 
manners,  enormously  improved  her  speech,  and  filled  in  some 
of  the  many  gaps  in  her  more  formal  education,  which  her 
father's  teaching  had  left.  The  friction  between  the  two 
mounted  steadily  during  the  entire  period  of  their  association. 
When  they  parted,  after  a  furious  final  quarrel,  they  hated 
each  other  cordially. 

Grace  Drummond's  experience  with  Helena  was  prophetic 
of  the  experience  of  many  others  who  were  to  take  up  her  role, 
or  something  like  it,  during  the  next  six  years.  They  got 
more  than  they  bargained  for. 

They  bargained  for  Anton  Galicz's  daughter.  And  they 
got,  besides,  Helena  Bogany's.  Helena,  I  think,  was  some 
times  misled  about  herself  in  the  same  way. 

As  I  said,  she  had  never  realized,  during  all  her  childhood, 
that  she  had  not  a  mother.  With  the  other  emotions  of  her 
adolescence,  this  sense  of  the  incompleteness  of  their  family 
came  to  her,  not  so  much  as  a  deprivation  as  an  opportunity 
for  dreams  and  wonderings  and  sentimental  thoughts.  At 
last  she  brought  up  the  subject  with  her  father — one  evening 
when  the  relation  between  them  was  particularly  tender,  in 


RIVEEDALE  99 

the  hope  of  making  it  tenderer  still — of  getting  one  more  turn 
out  of  the  emotional  screw.  But  the  effect  was  not  what  she 
expected.  Her  father's  face  set  like  marble,  and  for  a  minute 
he  pretended  not  to  have  heard.  Then  he  said,  "Ask  me  noth 
ing  about  her.  You  had  no  mother.  I  have  been  your 
mother." 

But  years  later,  on  the  last  night  of  his  liberty — after  the 
warning  of  his  impending  arrest  had  been  brought  to  him  and 
he  had  refused  to  avail  himself  of  it  for  an  attempted  flight, 
he,  of  his  own  accord,  told  her  the  story  of  his  disastrous 
love  of  Helena  Bogany — a  Hungarian  Jewess.  She  was  nine 
teen  years  old  when  Anton  first  saw  her.  They  were  married 
before  a  justice — after  it  had  become  evident  that  she  was 
with  child,  and  the  marriage  had  lasted  not  quite  three  years. 
Then  she  had  run  away  with  another  man ;  but  she  had  been 
unfaithful  to  him — Anton  thought — for  a  good  while  before 
that. 

"You  are  growing  into  her  looks,"  he  told  his  daughter, 
with  a  burning  gaze  into  her  face,  "You  are  not  yet  beauti 
ful  like  her,  though  it  is  possible  you  will  be,  one  day.  Your 
hair  and  skin  are  the  color  of  hers.  It  may  be  you  will  find 
her  blood  in  you,  too.  If  so,  fight  it.  She  was  not  an  upright 
woman.  She  was  greedy,  vain,  lustful.  She  loved  finery. 
She  was  a  milliner  by  trade,  and  good  at  it — made  good  pay. 
She  pretended  to  be  a  radical,  but  that  was  a  lie.  It  was  only 
that  for  a  while  she  was  in  love  with  me.  When  I  married 
her  she  wished  me  to  leave  my  philosophy  to  earn  money  for 
her — more  money  than  other  women's  husbands  earned  for 
them — so  that  she  could  be  better  dressed  than  they.  At  heart 
she  was  a  bourgeoise.  And  the  appetites  of  her  body  were  in 
satiable.  I  tell  it  for  a  warning  to  you.  They  will  put  me  in 
prison,  or  to  death.  But  you  will  be  left  to  avenge  me.  You 
are  a  good  daughter,  but  beware  of  vanity  and  of  the  appe 
tites  of  the  body,  lest  you  become  as  she." 

It  was  years  before  Helena  consciously  and  avowedly  re 
vised  that  story  in  a  different  light  from  the  one  in  which 
her  father  had  told  it  to  her  and  allowed  her  thoughts  to 


100  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

dwell,  in  open  pity  and  affection,  upon  the  rapturously  beauti 
ful,  high-spirited,  practically  efficient,  hot-sexed  young  thing 
who  had  BO  tragically  mismated  herself  with  an  abstracted 
idealist  dreamer — who  had  worked  for  him  for  a  while,  tried 
to  goad  him  into  giving  her  the  satisfactions  she  needed, 
stood  him  as  long  as  she  could,  and  then,  under  another 
passionate  and  perhaps  no  happier  attraction,  run  off  and 
left  him  for  some  one  else. 

But  long  before  she  admitted  that  view  of  the  story  into 
her  formulated  thoughts,  her  blood  had  been  interpreting  it 
for  her.  Her  mind  she  had  inherited,  in  some  of  its  elements, 
at  least,  from  her  father,  and  the  long  intimate  association 
with  him  had  enabled  him  to  stamp  his  seal  upon  it.  But 
her  body  was  her  mother's,  in  every  nerve  fiber,  in  all  its 
beauty  of  form,  color  and  texture,  in  all  its  swift  resiliency 
and  strength  and  adequacy  to  every  demand  that  could  be 
made  upon  it,  in  all  its  imperious  hungers. 

It  is  fair  to  say,  perhaps,  that  her  father's  apostolate  and 
the  martyrdom  which  crowned  it,  became  the  high  horse  upon 
which  Helena  Bogany's  daughter  rode  in  quest  of  adventure. 
This  quest  served  her  as  the  substitute  for  a  genuine  ambition. 
It  drove  her,  from  time  to  time,  into  furious  activities.  It 
stimulated  her  to  write  and  speak  in  the  radical  cause;  she 
did  both  effectively  but  neither  really  well.  In  speaking,  the 
deficiency  didn't  matter  because  her  electric  personality  and 
her  picturesqueness  covered  it.  When  one  read  her  articles, 
however,  one  realized  their  thin  personal  emotionality,  and 
was  irritated  by  her  excesses  in  the  use  of  exclamatory  ad 
jectives. 

In  one  way,  this  sense  of  riding  out  upon  a  high  adventure 
served  her  better  than  a  more  serious  ambition  would  have 
done.  It  gave  her  a  certain  aloofness  from  the  men  her  life 
associated  her  with;  enabled  her  to  set  a  higher  price  upon 
herself  than  any  of  her  would-be  lovers  could  pay.  It  was 
what  saved  her — this  sense  of  conserving  something  precious 
for  a  worthy  event — from  a  series,  during  those  years,  of 
shabby,  and  eventually  degrading,  illicit  love  affairs.  It  had 
eaved  her;  she  had  experimented,  more  or  less,  had  gone  close 


RIVERDALE  101 

to  the  edge  many  times,  but  she  had  never  gone  over — and 
she  was  immensely  proud  of  the  fact. 

Such  was  the  woman — the  two  women  in  one  flesh,  one 
might  almost  say,  Anton  Galicz's  daughter  and  Helena  Bo- 
gany's — who  lay  back  luxuriously  against  the  cushions  of 
Mrs.  Eobert  Corbett's  limousine,  listening  in  secret  contempt 
while  Hugh  told  her  his  plans  and  his  hopes  for  furthering 
the  welfare  of  his  grandfather's  employees,  and  thrilling  at 
the  same  time,  to  the  mere  sound  of  his  voice,  the  occasional 
touches  of  his  arm,  and  the  sight  of  that  hand  she  had 
wounded,  wrapped  in  a  clean  linen  handkerchief. 

She  was  roused  from  her  voluptuous  reverie — and  that  is 
what,  in  plain  terms,  it  was — by  a  surprising  act  of  her  com 
panion.  He  broke  off  a  sentence  in  the  middle,  sat  suddenly 
erect,  squared  around  toward  her,  and  peered  into  her  face, 
then  reached  over  and  switched  on  the  light. 

Thus,  for  the  first  time,  they  were  face  to  face ;  for  a  period 
of  two  or  three  seconds,  eye  to  eye.  Then  the  girl,  with  a 
gasp,  pulled  herself  erect,  shrank  back  into  her  corner  of  the 
seat,  and  shifted  a  lightning  glance  toward  the  door — the 
window. 

"Fm  sorry  if  I  frightened  you/'  said  Hugh,  switching  off 
the  light  again.  "I  got  the  idea  that  you  might  have  fainted, 
or — fallen  asleep.  Because  you  weren't  listening.  You  haven't 
listened  to  anything  I  have  said." 

She  was  surprised  into  admitting  that  this  was  true.  She 
had  not  expected  him  to  become  aware  of  her  inattention;  a 
certain  thick-skinned  complacency  going,  in  her  mind,  with 
the  sort  of  ideas  he  had  been  expressing;  a  complacency  in 
capable  of  harboring  the  possibility  that  there  could  be  a  wage- 
worker  in  the  world  who  wouldn't  listen  breathless  when  an 
employer  was  telling  about  the  beneficence  of  his  intentions. 
Once  more  he  had  confounded  her  categories. 

irLook  here,"  said  Hugh — and  now  she  did  listen — "3'ou 
started  this  strike.  If  you're  on  the  level,  you  started  it  to 
remedy  some  grievance.  Here's  your  chance  to  tell  me  what 
it  is.  You  won't  find  any  one  better  to  tell  it  to;  any  one 
who'll  fight  harder  to  bring  about  a  liberal  settlement." 


102  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

She  echoed  the  \vovds  "liberal  settlement"  under  her  breath, 
but  not  quite  inaudlbly. 

"Why  not?"  he  demanded.     "Isn't  that  what  you  want?" 

"No,"  she  said.  "It  isn't.  If  I  could  have  my  way  there 
would  never  be  a  settlement,  until  the  final  one." 

This  time  he  echoed  her  phrase,  but  in  blank  interrogation. 
"Final  one?" 

"Oh,  what's  the  use?"  she  cried.  "We'll  get  nowhere  by 
talking,  you  and  I.  There's  no  common  language  between 
your  class  and  mine.  Between  us  there  is  nothing  but  a 
fight  to  a  finish." 

Hugh  laughed  at  her.  "That's  plain  nonsense,"  he  said. 
"I  don't  believe  you  mean  it." 

"Do  you  call  this  strike  nonsense  ?  Doesn't  it  look  already 
as  if  I  meant  something?  Well,  it's  only  begun.  'Non 
sense!'"  she  fumed.  "Is  slavery  nonsense?" 

"Come,"  he  said  shortly.  "You're  not  on  a  platform,  and 
I'm  not  a  public  meeting.  Have  I  been  talking  like  a  slave- 
driver?" 

With  one  of  her  lightning  shifts  of  mood,  she  laughed. 
And  she  did  it  not  scornfully  nor  rhetorically,  but  with 
honest  amusement — a  fact  which  astonished  him  as  much  as 
her  words  themselves.  "That's  exactly  what  you  have  been 
talking  like.  Every  word  you  have  said."  Then  she  asked, 
"Have  you  ever  read  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin  ?" 

"I  don't  know,"  said  Hugh.  "Perhaps,  when  I  was  a  little 
boy.  Or  else  I  saw  the  play.  I  remember  the  bloodhounds, 
but  that's  about  all." 

"There  was  a  man  in  that  book,"  said  Helena,  "named 
Simon  Legree." 

Hugh  remembered  that.  "He's  the  one  that  whipped  Uncle 
Tom  to  death,"  he  corroborated. 

"It  wasn't  because  he  was  a  slave-owner  that  he  whipped 
Uncle  Tom  to  death,"  said  Helena.  "It  was  because  he  was 
a  bloody-minded  monster  and  a  fool  besides.  If  he'd  whipped 
all  his  slaves  to  death  he  wouldn't  have  been  a  slave-owner  any 
more.  There  were  other  slave-owners  with  better  sense.  They 
were  kind  to  their  slaves,  never  beat  them  at  all,  looked  after 


KIVERDALE  103 

them,  kept  them  happy  and  contented,  fed  them  well  so  that 
they  grew  big  and  strong  so  that  they  could  work  harder.  It 
paid.  And  besides,  it  was  the  proper  thing  to  do.  That's 
the  kind  of  slave-holder  you  are  trying  to  be. 

"No,  listen!"  she  commanded,  as  he  drew  breath  to  pro 
test.  "You  asked  for  frankness.  Well,  you  shall  have  it. 
You've  found  us  workers  resenting  your  welfare  schemes  and 
you've  wondered  why.  It's  because  we'd  rather  be  men  than 
sla\es.  And  you  were  trying  to  make  slaves  of  us.  Look  at 
your  Emergency  Loan  Fund !  That's  what  you  call  it,  isn't 
it?  .  .  ." 

It  was  characteristic  of  Helena  that,  without  listening  to 
him  at  all,  her  mind  had  been  automatically  recording  his 
phrases  all  along,  and  that,  now  she  was  aroused,  they  turned 
up  ready  to  her  hand. 

"Well,  suppose  I  am  in  trouble — need  money.  I  can  come 
to  you  and  borrow  it  without  security,  provided  I  have  a  good 
record ;  provided  I  have  been  sober  and  industrious ;  provided 
you  have  put  no  black  marks  against  my  name.  All  very 
philanthropic  and  helpful.  But  how  does  it  work?  It  works 
like  this :  that  concerning  every  action  of  my  life  I  must  take 
your  preferences  into  account.  You  won't  like  it  if  I  have 
radical  opinions.  I  must  not  be  an  I.  W.  W.,  nor  a  Socialist, 
nor  even  a  trades-unionist.  If  I  am,  I  must  keep  quiet  about 
it.  I  must  not  live  with  a  man  unless  I  am  married  to  him. 
I  must  not  drink  nor  gamble.  It  would  be  better  if  I  went  to 
church.  Above  all,  I  must  be  contented  with  my  lot — a 
loyal  employee,  grateful  to  you  for  not  taking  my  job  away 
from  me — selling  me  down  the  river,  that  is,  the  way  they  did 
Uncle  Tom. 

"If  you  go  on  as  you  have  begun,  an  employee  of  yours  will 
simply  be  a  marionette  and  all  his  strings  will  lead  back  to 
your  hands.  At  your  whim,  he  can  have  unlimited  credit 
at  the  Company  Stores.  Or,  at  your  whim,  he  can  have  none. 
And,  since  those  Company  Stores  have  driven  all  the  others 
out  of  business,  it  is  at  your  whim  what  he  shall  be  allowed 
to  buy.  You  even  talk  of  deciding  for  him  in  what  manner 
he  shall  be  allowed  to  bury  his  dead.  With  his  insurance  fund 


104  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

in  your  hands,  you  send  an  agent  into  his  home  to  decide 
whether  he  is  sick  or  not — how  he  shall  attempt  to  cure  him 
self ;  whether  he  shall  keep  his  windows  open  or  shut.  You 
have  put  the  authority  over  his  children  into  the  hands  of 
your  probation  officer. 

"And  now  you  talk  of  providing  for  his  amusement;  of 
taking  money  that  he  earned,  and  that  ought  to  be  in  his 
own  pocket,  and  of  building  a  park  with  it,  with  your  name 
over  the  gate,  and  a  bandstand  and  a  pavilion  where  he  may 
dance  with  his  girl  until  such  time  as  you  think  he  ought  to  go 
home  to  bed;  a  reading-room  where  he  may  read  such  books 
and  papers  as  you  pick  out  for  him ! 

"Maybe  your  ideas  are  liberal.  I  don't  know.  Maybe  you 
would  be  willing  that  we  should  read  and  think  quite  'pro 
gressive'  things.  Maybe  your  notions  of  health  and  thrift 
are  better  than  ours.  Maybe  we  would  be  sleeker  and  better  kept, 
more  moral  and  healthy  and  prosperous,  if  you  had  your  way. 

"But  the  morality  and  the  health  and  the  prosperity  would 
not  be  ours.  They  would  be  yours.  Something  for  you  to 
be  proud  of  and  show  off  to  visitors  and  write  articles  about 
in  the  magazines. 

"But  we — well,  we're  so  ungrateful  and  disloyal  as  to  think 
we'd  rather  look  after  our  own  welfare  and  live  our  own 
morality  and  enjoy  our  own  prosperity.  What  we  say  is  that 
if  we  got  what  our  labor  really  earned,  we  could  take  care  of 
ourselves  without  any  looking  after. 

"You  will  not  pay  us  what  we  really  earn,  because  if  you 
did,  there  would  be  nothing  left  for  you.  You  will  not  give  up 
what  makes  you  master  of  us — what  makes  life  easy  and  swift 
and  soft,  like  this" — her  gesture  indicated  the  car  they  were 
riding  in — "until,  by  force,  we  take  it  away  from  you.  We 
shan't  succeed  this  time.  You  don't  believe  we  ever  will  suc 
ceed.  Well,  wait!" 

What  all  along  had  lent  force  to  her  talk  was  the  conversa 
tional  manner  of  it — passionless,  matter-of-fact,  sometimes 
just  faintly  amused,  and  with  part  of  her  mind — part  of  her 
at  any  rate — obviously  somewhere  else,  as  when  one,  full  of 
his  own  thoughts,  tells  an  old  story  to  a  child.  At  the  end  of 


BIYERDALE  105 

it  sKe  stirred  uneasily,  as  a  dreamer  will,  and  dropped  back 
against  the  cushion,  her  arm  once  more  in  contact  with  his. 

He  had  not  spoken  all  the  while;  had  not  even,  after  she 
was  fairly  started,  moved  to  speak.  And  he  did  not  speak 
now. 

After  a  silence,  she  said  musingly,  "For  the  good  of  the 
slaves,  I  wish  that  all  masters  were  like  Simon  Legree — cruel 
and  unashamed.  The  war  would  come  sooner  and  be  sooner 
over.  It  is  not  hatred  and  violence  that  darken  the  issue.  It's 
this  hypocritical,  cowardly  philanthropy.  Welfare  work !" 

Then,  instantly,  "I  don't  mean  you.  You're  not  a  coward 
and  I  don't  believe  you're  a  hypocrite.  I  don't  know  what  to 
make  of  you  exactly." 

"I  don't  know  what  to  make  of  you,"  he  said.  And  it 
sounded  as  though  he  spoke  through  tight-clenched  teeth. 
"What  you've  been  saying  to  me  is  surprising  enough.  I  don't 
know  what  to  think  about  that.  I  don't  believe  you're  right, 
though  I  am  beginning  to  see  where  I  have  been  wrong.  But 
what  you  have  said  isn't  so  amazing  as  what  you  are — who 
you  are/' 

"We're  from  the  opposite  sides  of  the  earth,  you  and  I,"  she 
said.  "How  should  we  understand  each  other  ?  We're  talking 
the  same  language,  but  the  words  mean  different  things  to  us. 
You've  traveled  I  suppose,  and  so  have  I.  But  you  have  never 
ridden  on  a  second-class  ticket  in  the  smoking-car.  The  con 
ductor  isn't  a  man  you  wince  from  because  you're  afraid  that 
he'll  kick  your  bundle  if  it  sticks  out  a  little  into  the  aisle.  Men 
in  brass  buttons  are  people  you  expect  to  touch  their  hats  and 
take  your  orders.  But  I  remember  them,  from  childhood,  as 
people  who  grabbed  me  by  the  arm  and  pushed  me  about — 
tyrants  who  avenged  their  servility  to  you  on  me.  To  you,  of 
course,  the  judges  and  the  police  are  faithful  servants  anxious 
for  your  good  opinion,  alert  and  busy  seeing  that  your  prop 
erty  isn't  damaged,  nor  your  peace  disturbed." 

"I  can  see  how  they  look  very  different  from  that  to  you," 
Hugh  said;  " — after  this  experience  you've  been  having 
with  us." 

"This  experience !"    She  uttered  a  short  grim  laugh'. 


106  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

"Oh,  I  suppose  you  may  have  had  others  as  bad/'  he  ad 
mitted.  "The  law's  a  clumsy,  blundering  sort  of  machine,  I 
know.  Still  the  idea  of  it  is  to  protect  you  as  well  as  it  pro 
tects  me." 

She  turned  to  stare  at  him,  her  whole  body  tense  as  if  with 
astonishment.  "I  suppose  you  really  believe  that,"  she  said, 
going  slack  again  with  a  sigh.  "Sometimes  I  want  to  laugh. 
I  think,  if  one  could  laugh  at  it  as  it  deserves  to  be  laughed  at, 
he  could  shake  the  world  down." 

Suddenly,  in  a  new  voice,  that  thrilled  and  horrified  him  and 
shook  him  as  never  before  in  his  life  had  he  been  shaken,  she 
began  telling  the  story  of  her  father's  apostolate  and  his  mar 
tyrdom.  Occasionally  the  story  dipped  into  her  early  child 
hood,  but  most  of  it  was  after  they  went  West.  She  told  of 
towns  where  they  had  been  mobbed  and  beaten  by  respectable 
citizens,  towns  where  they  had  been  taken  to  the  railroad  sta 
tion  and  put  forcibly  upon  a  train  only  to  be  seized  at  their 
enforced  destination  by  waiting  police  officers  and  thrown  into 
jail.  She  told  of  shifty  subterfuges  to  trick  her  father  into 
the  technical  violation  of  some  statute  or  ordinance,  of 
trumped-up  charges  and  perjured  charges  against  them.  She 
told  of  cynical  violations  of  even  the  bare  letter  of  the  law, 
on  the  part  of  its  officers,  when  it  could  not  be  twisted  to  serve 
their  purposes. 

She  showed  him  some  vivid  little  fragments  of  the  great 
Gold  Creek  strike,  sharp  as  cut  steel ;  the  night  of  the  raid  on 
their  little  newspaper;  the  way  her  father  took  the  news  of 
the  dynamiting  of  the  bunk-house;  the  pride  with  which  he 
refused  to  avail  himself  of  the  warning  they  brought  him  that 
he  was  to  be  charged  with  the  crime.  And  last  of  all  she 
told  him  about  the  trial. 

All  the  way  through  the  recital  the  emotional  tension  of  it 
had  been  mounting  steadily  toward  this  climax.  The  note  of 
it,  throughout,  had  been  defiant,  bitter,  as  of  one  who  neither 
looked  for  nor  wished  sympathy,  but  now  her  voice  grew  fairly 
raucous  with  passion — quivered  and  flamed  with  it. 

The  maddening  quality  about  the  trial  for  Helena,  and  evi 
dently  for  her  father,  had  been  what  she  called  the  hypocrisy 


EIVERDALE  107 

of  it — the  solemn  pretense  at  fair  play — the  mockery  of  the 
presumption  of  innocence  until  guilt  was  proved — the  pon 
tifical  airs.  It  was  not  the  foregone  conclusion,  which  sat  there 
leering  at  them  from  the  beginning,  but  the  mask  of  an  im 
partial  search  for  truth,  which  it  insisted,  to  the  very  end,  on 
leering  through,  that  maddened  its  victims. 

"If  they  had  taken  him  and  killed  him  with  honest,  decent 
violence,"  she  said,  "I  wouldn't  hate  them — loathe  them,  the 
way  I  do  I" 

Anton,  it  seemed,  had  wished  not  to  have  his  case  defended 
at  all;  had  wanted  to  go  into  court  alone,  without  a  friend 
or  counselor,  and  let  them  have  their  will  with  him.  But 
he  had  been  overborne  by  his  committee,  who  had  raised  a  de 
fense  fund  and  had  employed  a  showy  criminal  lawyer  with  it. 
Anton  felt  himself  and  his  cause  besmirched  by  the  tactics, 
the  legal  tricks  and  lies  employed  in  his  defense.  And  when 
the  trial  was  over,  and  the  verdict,  "Murder  in  the  first  de 
gree/'  brought  in  by  the  jury,  he  took  advantage  of  his  op 
portunity  before  the  judge  pronounced  sentence,  to  repudiate 
every  plea  that  had  been  advanced  in  his  defense,  and  chal 
lenged  the  judge  to  inflict  the  death  penalty. 

But  the  grinning  mask  of  fairness  and  clemency  was  held 
up  to  the  end.  The  judge  gave  him  twenty  years — a  derisive 
equivalent  to  imprisonment  for  life — a  slow  living  death,  in 
stead  of  a  merciful  swift  one. 

Helena  had  taken  her  last  farewell  of  her  father,  there  in 
the  court  room.  He  had  forbidden  her  to  write  to  him,  or  to 
attempt  to  see  him.  She  was  to  consider  him  dead.  His  life 
ended  when  his  freedom  did.  All  she  had  left  of  her  father 
was  a  memory  to  avenge.  His  actual  death  had  not  occurred 
until  about  a  year  ago. 

The  story  told,  the  passion  it  had  evoked  ebbed  out  with  it. 
Once  more  Hugh  felt  against  his  shoulder  the  weight  and 
warmth  of  her  body,  could  detect  the  relaxed  expirations  of 
slow,  deep  indrawn  breaths.  Neither  of  them  said  anything 
for  a  while.  The  car  was  gliding  along  between  the  lights  of 
Washington  Boulevard.  By  and  by  the  girl  roused  herself 
and  looked  out  the  window. 


108  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

"We  must  be  getting  near  where  I  want  to  go,"  she  said. 
"Do  you  know  just  where  we  are?" 

Hugh  was  able  to  identify  the  next  cross  street,  and  told  her 
the  name  of  it.  "This  chauffeur,"  he  added,  "is  one  of  their 
detectives  that  I  commandeered  for  the  job,  so  we'd  better  not 
let  him  drive  you  all  the  way  to  where  you  are  going." 

She  laughed  and  thanked  him  for  the  precaution.  She  had 
forgotten  that  detail  herself. 

"Better  stop  here,"  she  said,  and  Hugh  gave  the  order. 

It  was  a  moment  after  the  car  stopped  before  she  moved. 
And  in  that  moment  Hugh's  heart  came  up  into  his  throat. 

"I  don't  want  to  force  your  confidence,"  he  said  unsteadily. 
"If  you  want  to — disappear  from  me,  as  well  as  from  him, 
why — this  is  your  chance  to  do  it.  I'll  let  you  go  as  I  prom 
ised." 

It  was  a  fact  crystal-clear  to  the  perception  of  Anton  Ga- 
licz's  daughter,  that  she  should  take  him  at  his  word;  that 
fire,  edged-tools,  dynamite,  would  not  be  more  dangerous  toys 
for  her  to  play  with  than  this  clean,  beautiful  young  aristocrat. 

But  it  was  Helena  Bogany's  daughter  who  answered  him. 

"I  don't  want  to  disappear  from  you,"  she  said.  "I'll  bo 
glad  if  you  will  come  with  me." 

So  Hugh  dismissed  the  amazed  detective  (he  and  Helena 
stood  on  the  curb  and  watched  the  car  out  of  sight  as  a 
precaution  against  their  being  followed),  then  walked  with 
her  three  or  four  blocks,  to  an  old-fashioned,  rather  pleasant- 
looking  brick  apartment-building  with  a  whole  row  of  gabled 
roofs.  At  one  of  the  numerous  entrances  Helena  stopped. 

"A  newspaper  girl  lives  here,"  she  said.  "I  stay  with  her 
sometimes.  She  probably  isn't  at  home,  but  I  know  where 
she  keeps  the  key.  Will  you  come  in  ?" 

"I'd  rather  not  to-night,"  Hugh  said.  "Not  if  I  can  see 
you  some  other  time.  I  must  talk  more  with  you.  We  haven't 
begun.  And  yet,  you've  told  me  so  much — taught  me  so  much 
already,  I'm — bewildered,  somehow — shaken.  I  want  time 
to  think — get  my  wits  together,  before  I  see  you  again.  But 
can  I  find  you  again,  if  I  let  you  go  now  ?  Shall  you  be  stay 
ing  here  for  a  while — or  coming  back  ?" 


BIVERDALE  100. 

"No  one  ever  knows  where  I  am  going  to  be,"  she  said.  "But 
Alice  Hayes  (she's  the  girl  who  lives  here)  knows  as  much 
about  me  as  any  one.  Her  telephone's  in  the  book,  so  you 
can  call  her  up." 

All  that  was  rather  cavalierly  said,  with  an  edge  of  some 
thing  like  derision  in  the  voice.  Then,  without  growing  any 
gentler,  the  quality  of  it  changed — darkened. 

"There's  no  telling  anything  about  me,"  she  said.  "I'm  as 
much  surprised  at  the  things  I  do  sometimes,  as  anybody  else. 
But,  to-night  .  .  ." 

Suddenly  she  reached  for  his  wounded  hand,  raised  it 
gently  in  both  of  hers,  bent  her  face  over  it,  and  touched  the 
palm  with  her  lips.  She  retained  it  just  a  fleeting  instant 
longer  while  she  said  something  he  could  not  hear,  then 
bruskly  let  it  go  and  went  in.  He  did  not  follow. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

HE  saw  her  the  next  day,  though  he  had  no  such  inten 
tion  when  he  left  her  at  Alice  Hayes'  door.    The  per 
son  who  brought  this  about  was,  absurdly  enough,  his 
brother  Gregory. 

The  clan  had  gathered  in  considerable  force  for  that  im 
perishable  institution,  the  one  o'clock  Sunday  dinner.  The 
two  Gregorys,  leaving  all  quiet  at  Riverdale,  and  Bailey  in 
command,  had  come  back  to  town  about  eleven  o'clock;  Rob 
ert,  Senior,  and  his  wife,  according  to  almost  inviolable  custom, 
had  been  to  church  (the  Corbetts  were  Presbyterians) ;  Rob 
ert,  Junior,  had  surprised  them  all  by  dropping  off  on  his  way 
through  from  Wyoming  to  Long  Island  for  some  polo.  He 
had  read  about  the  strike  in  the  papers  just  as  Hugh  had  done, 
canceled  his  reservation  on  the  Twentieth  Century,  and  come 
home  to  offer  himself  as  a  volunteer — an  orthodox  manifes 
tation  of  the  clan-spirit  which  pleased  his  grandfather  might 
ily;  his  father,  too,  for  that  matter,  and  even  Greg — though 
the  latter,  remembering  Hugh's  remarks  about  medieval 
barons  and  tin  generals,  said  he  didn't  know  what  there  was 
Robert  could  do.  "We  aren't  sniping  strikers  from  the  roofs, 
you  know." 

None  of  them  had  seen  Hugh  until  he  came  down-stairs  just 
at  dinner-time  and  took  his  place  at  the  table.  They  wanted 
to  know,  of  course,  what  was  the  matter  with  his  hand  (he 
had  the  two  middle  fingers  bandaged),  but  on  his  saying  curtly 
that  it  was  nothing,  they  forebore,  for  the  time,  to  press  him 
further.  The  newcomer  from  Wyoming  occupied  the  focus 
of  their  attention  and  Hugh  was  allowed  to  sit  through  the 
dinner  in  almost  unbroken  silence. 

When  old  Gregory  left  the  table,  however,  at  the  end  of  the 
meal,  summoning  his  daughter-in-law  to  come  with  him  to 

110 


'RIVERDALE  111 

rub  his  head  so  that  he  could  go  to  sleep — a  frequent  demand 
of  his — young  Greg  turned  on  Hugh  with  a  question  that 
obviously  had  been  awaiting  release  for  a  good  while. 

"What  the  devil  have  you  done  with  that  girl?"  he  asked. 
"Where  is  she  now?" 

Robert,  Senior,  since  he  did  not  smoke,  had  thrust  back  his 
chair  preparatory  to  leaving  them,  and  Robert,  Junior, 
slumped  down  on  his  backbone,  was  hooking  his  mother's  chair 
around  so  that  he  could  put  his  feet  upon  it.  Greg's  question 
galvanized  them  both  into  attitudes  of  complete  astonishment. 

But  Hugh,  who  was  drinking  his  coffee,  went  on  and  fin 
ished  it  and  set  his  cup  down  accurately  in  his  saucer,  before 
he  answered. 

"I  don't  know  where  she  is  now,"  he  said.  "I  know  where 
I  left  her,  but  I  have  no  idea  whether  she's  still  there." 

There  was  a  bristling  little  silence  while  the  other  three 
waited  for  him  to  go  on.  Then,  simultaneously,  both  the 
Roberts  asked: 

"What  girl?" 

Hugh  waited  a  moment  to  see  whether  Gregory  wished  to 
answer  the  question,  then  addressed  himself  to  his  father. 

"The  girl  who  started  the  strike,"  he  said.  "Bullen  and 
O'Hara  have  got  the  idea  fixed  in  their  minds  that  we  want 
her  made  away  with,  and  they  keep  trying  to  kidnap  her.  I 
learned  about  their  plans  last  night,  and  interfered." 

"I  should  think  you  did!"  said  Gregory.  "You  took  an 
awful  chance,  but  I  don't  deny  it  worked.  I'd  like  to  know 
how  you  did  it." 

"Did  what  ?"  demanded  Hugh.  "I  don't  know  what  you're 
talking  about." 

"Why,"  said  Gregory,  turning  to  his  father,  "the  girl  has 
simply  disappeared.  From  the  strikers,  I  mean.  They  don't 
know  where  she  is.  They're  all  up  in  the  air  about  her.  She 
telephoned  out  to  their  Strike  Headquarters  last  night — about 
midnight — told  them  she  was  all  right,  but  was  going  to  keep 
quiet  for  two  or  three  days.  They  don't  know  what  to  make 
of  that  any  more  than  we  do.  Up  to  nine  o'clock  this  morn 
ing  they  hadn't  heard  anything  more  from  her." 


112  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

Robert,  Senior,  turned  a  look  of  perplexity  from  one  of  his 
eldest  sons  to  the  other. 

"You  are  mistaken,"  he  said  at  last  to  Hugh,  "in  thinking 
we  have  given  any  instructions  to  Bullen  and  O'Hara  that  in 
volved  foul  play.  I  find  it  difficult  to  understand  how  you 
can  have  entertained  such  an  idea  for  a  moment." 

"I  think  you  will  understand,"  said  Hugh,  "when  I  tell 
you  just  what  happened."  Which  he  forthwith  proceeded  to 
do,  relating  his  conversation  with  Paddock  and  the  measures 
he  had  taken  for  frustrating  the  detectives'  plans.  He  made 
an  end  of  his  story  at  the  point  where  he  drove  away  with 
the  girl. 

"I  told  her  she  was  free  to  go  wherever  she  liked,"  he  con 
cluded,  "and  I  gave  her  my  personal  guarantee  that  she  should 
not  be  molested  any  further.  And  I'll  be  glad  to  know,"  he 
added,  "whether  I  shall  have  to  make  good  that  guarantee  in 
person,  or  whether  the  firm  will  take  action  to  make  it  un 
necessary." 

His  father,  who  was  visibly  shocked  by  the  recital,  left  no 
doubt  under  that  head.  He  rang  for  the  butler,  and  ordered 
him  to  get  Bullen  or  O'Hara,  in  person,  on  the  telephone  at 
once. 

"If  you  have  any  means  of  communicating  with  the  young 
woman,"  he  said  to  Hugh,  "I  wish  you  would  inform  her  that 
she  has  been  the  victim  of  the  excessive  zeal  of  our  employees, 
and  convey  to  her  my  assurance  that  it  will  not  occur  again." 
He  rose  with  a  good  deal  of  dignity  and  walked  away  to  the 
telephone. 

No  one  else  said  anything  until  he  had  left  the  room,  but 
both  Hugh's  brothers  were  visibly  awaiting  the  opportunity 
his  absence  would  give  to  go  into  the  matter  further  and  more 
freely. 

Bob's  line  was  a  rather  skeptical  amusement.  He  had  great 
confidence  in  his  own  powers  with  women,  and  would  have 
backed  himself  any  day  to  accomplish  the  feat  which,  accord 
ing  to  his  interpretation  of  the  episode,  Hugh  had  accom 
plished.  But  that  Hugh  should  even  have  attempted  it,  struck 
him  as  almost  funny. 


RTVEEDALE  113 

Hugh  was  two  years  older  than  lie,  remember,  midway  be 
tween  him  and  Gregory,  which  meant  that  during  their  youth 
and  earliest  manhood,  he  had  been  a  mediator  as  well;  had 
preached  Greg's  sermons  to  Bob  and  pleaded  Bob's  causes  with 
Gregory. 

Bob,  as  I  have  said,  was  a  perfectly  conventional  black 
sheep,  and  his  youthful  scrapes  had  been  mainly  the  sort  that 
girls  get  a  man  into.  When  he  found  himself  in  beyond  the 
possibility  of  self-extrication,  he  usually  confided  in  Hugh 
and  followed  his  advice  far  enough  to  avoid  the  most  immedi 
ate  and  unpleasant  consequences.  There  was  nothing  recipro 
cal  about  this  relation,  however.  Hugh  never  confided  any 
of  his  affairs  to  him ;  had,  apparently,  none  to  confide. 

As  Bob  grew  older  and  began  taking  his  man-of-the-world 
morality  for  granted,  his  attitude  toward  Hugh,  as  far  as  sex- 
matters  were  concerned — and  these  were,  it  is  fair  enough  to 
say,  the  principal  interest  of  his  life — became  the  typical  atti 
tude  of  the  conventional  libertine  toward  the  man  who  has 
remained,  so  far  as  he  knows,  continent — an  attitude  at  once 
skeptical  and  contemptuous. 

So  far  as  Bob  was  able  to  discover,  Hugh  had  never  taken 
the  slightest  interest  either  in  the  outright  disreputable  and 
mercenary  class  of  women,  or  in  the  semi-respectable  and  half 
way  disinterested  ones  whose  more  seductive  snares  lie  spread 
for  the  feet  of  college  students  with  ample  allowances.  Among 
nice  girls — the  sort,  that  is,  who  could  be  invited  to  college 
dances — Hugh  had  been  popular  enough.  He  danced  well  and 
was  not  in  the  least  shy  or  self-conscious  with  them.  Only,  he 
was  always  an  unsatisfactory  sort  of  an  enigma  to  them,  due 
to  his  steering  his  course,  not  by  the  pole-star  fact  that  they 
were  female  and  he  was  male,  but  by  some  curious  orientation 
of  his  own.  He  talked  to  them  just  as  he  would  talk  to  any 
body;  used  the  same  standards  that  he  applied  to  everybody 
in  determining  whether  he  liked  them  or  not.  He  was  fond  of 
his  elder  sister  Constance  and  on  comfortable  friendly  terms 
with  a  few  of  her  women  friends — notably  with  the  beautiful 
Frederica  Whitney,  Rodney  Aldrich's  sister.  And  it  had  been 
entirely  characteristic  of  him  that  at  Anne's  wedding,  with  a 


114  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

wonderful  selection  of  bridesmaids  to  intrigue  his  unattached 
fancy,  he  had  spent  his  time  making  friends  in  quasi-avuncu 
lar  fashion,  with  little  Jean  Gilbert. 

You  can  understand  then,  I  imagine,  well  enough  how  Bob 
would  look  at  this  adventure  of  his  brother's.  What  the  devil 
had  Hugh  done  to  her  in  those  two  hours  ? 

Greg  was  curious  about  this,  too,  though  it  was  not  the 
aspect  of  the  affair  that  interested  him  most. 

"I  can't  complain/'  he  said.  "Because  you  got  away  with 
it.  Somehow  or  other,  you  accomplished  about  seven  times 
as  much  as  Paddock  would  have.  Those  other  strike  leaders 
are  simply  up  in  the  air,  and  a  little  doubt  or  suspicion  in  a 
case  like  that  will  go  a  long  way.  If  she  sticks  to  the  line 
she  took  last  night,  the  whole  damned  strike  might  collapse. 
But  it  makes  me  sweat  every  time  I  think  of  the  chance  you 
took." 

"You  said  that  once  before,"  said  Hugh.  "What  I  did 
seemed  obvious  enough  to  me.  I  can't  see  that  I  took  any 
such  frightful  chance." 

Bob  laughed.  But  Gregory  just  stared  for  a  moment  in 
blank  exasperation.  Then,  "You  don't !"  he  exclaimed.  "Well, 
just  suppose  for  a  minute  you  had  not  got  away  with  it.  Sup 
pose  any  one  of  a  hundred  things  that  could  have  happened 
about  three  times  as  easily  as  not.  Suppose  some  one  of  her 
crowd  had  recognized  the  car  and  you  in  it — seen  one  of  our 
family  carrying  her  off.  Suppose  the  girl,  instead  of  tele 
phoning  as  she  did,  that  she  was  all  right,  had  said  that  you'd 
tried  to  carry  her  off,  but  that  she'd  escaped  you.  Any  story 
ehe  chose  to  tell  would  be  believed: — that  you'd  abused  her, 
tried  to  rape  her — anything.  And  it  would  have  gone  from 
one  end  of  the  country  to  the  other.  Put  a  mark  on  you  and 
the  whole  family  that  we  couldn't  outlive  for  a  generation. 

"And  what  kind  of  a  story  could  you  tell? — Not  that  it 
would  make  any  difference,  because  nobody  would  believe  it. 
— All  you  could  say  would  be  that  we,  all  the  rest  of  us,  I 
mean,  grandfather  and  father  and  I,  were  in  a  conspiracy  to 
make  away  with  the  girl  and  that  you  stepped  in  and  tried 
to  break  it  up.  And  that  would  have  a  likely  sound,  wouldn't 


RIVEBDALE  115 

it,  since  you  had  the  family  limousine  with  a  Bullen  and 
O'Hara  man  driving  it !" 

He  pulled  in  a  long  breath  and  released  it  with  a  whoosh ! 
"I  can't  understand  her  letting  you  off  like  that,"  he  went 
on.  "Look  at  the  advantage  she  had  right  there  in  her  hands 
— the  personal  advantage,  let  alone  the  other.  She  could  have 
got  anything  out  of  us  she  wanted  in  the  way  of  blackmail. 
And  it's  what  you'd  expect  her  to  do,  on  the  dope !  Because 
she  isn't  an  honest-to-God  working  girl  at  all.  Just  a  pro 
fessional  trouble-maker." 

"Well,  she's  passed  up  one  wonderful  chance/5  said  Bob. 
"Or  it  looks  as  if  she  had.  Of  course  by  to-morrow  morning 
we  may  find  she's  changed  her  mind." 

"No,"  said  Gregory,  "I  don't  think  so.  A  story  like  that  has 
got  to  be  told  quick.  If  you  don't  tell  it  the  minute  you're 
free  to  tell  it,  your  chance  for  getting  it  believed  grows  pretty 
thin.  No,  she's  taken  her  line  all  right  and  she  won't  change 
it.  We're  safe  enough  now. 

"But" — here  he  turned  to  Hugh — "for  the  love  of  heaven, 
never  try  to  pull  anything  like  that  again !" 

He  saw  Hugh  looking  pretty  thoughtful  over  this,  evidently 
impressed,  and  gave  the  talk  another  turn  under  the  comfort 
able  conviction  that,  for  once,  an  admonition  to  his  next 
younger  brother  had  had  a  good  effect. 

It  was  a  conviction  ludicrously  ill-founded.  For  the  as 
pect  of  the  business  that  had  caught  Hugh,  was  the  girl's  for 
bearance — her  good  sportsmanship,  in  not  making  use  of  the 
opportunity  which  Greg  had  so  clearly  pointed  out. 

"What  with  the  pain  in  his  injured  hand  and  the  excitement 
incident  upon  that  fine  rage  of  his,  he  had  hardly  slept  since 
he  left  her.  In  those  waking  hours,  he  had  had  leisure  for  a 
lot  of  what  he  supposed  was  cool  level-headed  thinking. 

Hugh  was,  perhaps,  not  very  exceptional  in  attributing  to 
himself  qualities  he  did  not  possess,  and  in  supposing  himself 
deficient  in  other  qualities  which  he  possessed  to  a  marked 
degree.  We  all  conform  pretty  much  to  the  superficial  char 
acterizations  of  those  persons  who  see  us  oftenest.  Because, 
from  boyhood,  anger  had  never  made  Hugh  turn  purple  and 


116  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

sputter  the  way  Gregory  did,  the  family  tradition  was  that 
he  never  was  angry.  And  he  grew  up  believing  himself  to  lu» 
a  rather  imperturbable  person.  Because  he  never  sentimental 
ized  over  his  conventional  affections  (his  failure  to  aehirvo 
college  loyalty  or  any  of  the  subdivisions  of  it,  is  one  example 
of  this,  and  his  attitude  toward  his  mother  is  another)  he  was 
supposed  to  be  unemotional.  Because  of  his  indifference  to 
acclaimed  success,  his  positive  dislike  of  looking  important,  he 
was  written  down  in  the  family  books  as  impractical — vision 
ary — quixotic — on  the  way  to  becoming,  unless  he  was  looked 
out  for,  a  mere  disembodied  idealist. 

This  last  attitude  he  did  object  to ;  believed  he  had  as  much 
common  sense  as  anybody,  and  resented  the  notion  that  he 
needed  looking  after.  But  for  the  rest,  he  adopted  the  family 
characterization  as  a  working  basis. 

If  he  had  been  disposed  to  confide  to  any  one  a  true  account 
of  his  emotional  states  the  night  before,  from  the  time  lie  ar 
rived  at  the  plant  until  he  left  the  girl  at  the  door  of  Alice 
Hayes'  apartment,  he  would  have  said  that  except  for  about 
five  minutes  after  Gregory  had  made  that  remark  about  rose- 
water  and  powder-puff  methods,  he  had  been  perfectly  cool — 
a  little  abnormally  cool,  if  anything.  A  man  might  have  been 
forgiven  for  getting  excited  over  that  kidnaping  affair.  But 
he,  fortunately,  had  not. 

Also,  he  would  have  said  that  his  brother  Robert's  attempt 
to  import  a  sex-element  into  his  affair  with  the  girl  was  a  sick 
ening  calumny.  You  couldn't  blame  Bob.  He  had  sex  on  the 
brain — had  had  since  he  was  ten  years  old.  But  it  was  a  pity 
that  an  otherwise  good  chap  like  that,  should  go  so  far  wrong. 

That  blazing  .young  anarchist  he  had  rescued  from  the  de 
tectives  had  given  him  a  glimpse  of  a  point  of  view  that  to 
him  was  new  and  most  disturbing.  He  wanted  to  know  more 
about  it — wanted  to  make  sure  he  understood  it.  That  was 
why  he  had  spent  most  of  the  night  thinking  how  and  when 
he  should  see  her  again  and  what  he  should  say  to  her  when  he 
did.  That  she  had  an  extraordinarily  vivid  and  stimulating 
personality  was,  of  course,  true.  But  the  fact  that  she  was  a 
woman,  was,  as  far  as  his  interest  in  her  went,  wholly  fortui- 


BIVERDALE  117 

tous  and  unessential.  Of  course,  being  a  woman,  she  did 
things  differently  from  the  way  a  man  would  have  done  them. 
A  man,  it  might  be  conceded,  wouldn't  have  bitten  his  hand 
in  the  first  place,  nor  have  kissed  it  afterward. 

He  wished  he  might  have  made  out  what  it  was  she  said, 
almost  voicelessly,  her  face  bent  over  that  hand,  in  the  moment 
of  their  parting.  He  wondered  if  it  would  be  possible  for  him 
to  ask  her,  when  next  they  met.  It  was  a  breathless  notion. 

He  had  considered  trying  to  see  her  again  that  day,  but 
during  the  morning  he  had  decided  against  it.  Evidently, 
from  what  she  had  said  last  night,  there  was  a  literature  of 
syndicalism,  and  he  must  try  to  find  and  read  some  of  it,  in 
order  not  to  be  too  great  an  ignoramus,  before  he  talked  to  her 
again.  He'd  go  down  to  the  Crerar  Library  the  first  chance  he 
got  and  see  if  he  could  find  anything.  Then,  it  was  possible 
that  Eodney  Aldrich  might  know  something  about  it.  His  in 
formation  was  sometimes  found  to  have  proliferated  out  into 
strange  and  uncharted  territories.  But  he  was,  somewhat 
surprisingly,  getting  married  within  a  week  or  two,  to  a  young 
girl  student  in  the  University,  and  might  he  hard  to  find. 

It  may  be  questioned  whether  these  prudential  resolutions 
would  have  held  in  any  case,  but  the  talk  around  the  family 
dinner-table  put  an  end  to  them.  His  father  had  given  him, 
explicitly,  a  message  to  the  girl.  And,  in  the  light  of  what 
Gregory  had  said,  it  became  important  to  deliver  it  at  once. 
Her  decision,  as  reported  by  Gregory's  spy,  to  remain  away 
from  Riverdale  for  two  or  three  days,  might  easily  enough 
have  been  dictated  by  the  belief  that  her  reappearance  there 
would  be  the  signal  for  another  assault,  another  attempt  by  the 
detectives — the  more  determined  for  having  been  twice  foiled 
— to  put  her  permanently  out  of  the  way.  And,  in  view  of 
her  really  fine  sportsmanship  in  reassuring  her  friends,  at  the 
first  possible  moment,  of  her  safety,  it  was  a  simple  matter  of 
fair  play  to  tell  her  that  her  fears  were  groundless. 

She  received  him,  by  appointment,  at  five  o'clock  that  after 
noon.  Alice  Hayes,  with  whom  he  had  talked  over  the  tele 
phone,  was  not  at  home — rather  factitiously  not  at  home,  it 
struck  him  somehow — though  perhaps  that  notion  sprang 


118  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

from  the  stiff  discomfort,  shared  with  him,  obviously  enough, 
by  Helena,  for  the  first  half-hour  or  so  of  his  visit.  It 
seemed  flatly  incredible  that  this  young  woman  and  the  girl 
who  had  struggled  with  him  in  the  car  last  night  and  told  him 
her  story,  and  kissed  his  hand,  could  be  the  same  person.  She 
was  unbecomingly  dressed  in  a  badly- fitting  frock  that  looked 
as  if  it  didn't  belong  to  her  (It  did,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  be 
long  to  Alice  Hayes.  Her  own  things  had  been  badly  damaged 
in  the  struggle  of  the  night  before)  and  her  manners  and  her 
speech  fitted  her  no  better  than  the  clothes — were  full  of  little 
conventional  observances  and  school-mistresslike  pedantries — 
things  that  Grace  Drummond  had  taught  her  to  do,  and,  more 
importantly,  to  avoid  doing. 

Hugh,  sitting  in  the  supposedly  easy  chair,  which  she  had 
hospitably  insisted  that  he  take,  the  glare  from  a  brick  wall 
across  the  court  shining  horizontally  through  the  low  window 
into  his  eyes,  felt  heavily  let  down.  His  own  speech,  he  was 
aware,  had  become  as  pedantic  and  inadequate  as  hers. 

He  had  acknowledged  to  himself  in  advance  of  their  meet 
ing  no  special  expectations  regarding  it.  But  he  found  him 
self  now  in  a  state  of  exasperated  disappointment. 

He  had  begun  by  conveying  his  father's  message  to  her — a 
thing  that  went  naturally  into  rather  set  terms,  by  way  of 
making  its  assurances  more  binding.  She  received  it,  some 
how  or  other,  blankly.  He  hadn't  wanted  gratitude,  of  course, 
but  what  he  had  counted  on  to  break  the  ice  and  put  him  on 
comfortable  terms  with  her  seemed  actually  to  produce  the 
opposite  effect. 

Then  followed,  as  I  have  said,  the  interval  of  politeness: 
Alice  Hayes  and  what  a  good  friend  she  was  of  Helena's ;  and 
how  sorry  Hugh  was  not  to  meet  her;  and  the  inviolable  en 
gagement  that  had  prevented  her  being  there  to  meet  him. 
All  perfectly  sterile  and  hopeless. 

Hugh,  at  last,  determined  to  get  somewhere,  began  asking 
her  questions  about  syndicalism.  Where  the  movement  started ; 
who  its  leaders  were ;  wherein  they  differed  from  socialists — 
from  anarchists,  and  so  on. 


RIVEEDALE  119 

She  answered  all  these  questions,  some  of  them  at  length, 
and  Hugh  began  getting  what  he  had  honestly  believed  was 
the  thing  he  had  come  out  here  for — information  about  a  new 
system  of  ideas — the  elucidation  of  a  point  of  view  that  was 
new  to  him. 

But  getting  all  this  still  failed  to  satisfy  him.  What  was 
it  he  had  wanted  then?  Even  now  he  was  not  willing  to 
answer  that  question  in  so  many  words.  But  it  was  plain  even 
to  him  that  he  wanted  something  more  than  an  abstract  and 
decidedly  doctrinaire  and  curiously  half-hearted  exposition 
of  a  new  social  philosophy.  Where  was  the  fire — the  thrill — 
the  electric  emanation  that  had  given  life  to  everything  she 
had  said  to  him  last  night  ?  It  came  to  the  pass  at  last  where 
she  had  to  break  off  a  sentence  in  the  middle  in  order  to  bite 
down  an  irresistible  yawn. 

"I  am  boring  you  to  death !"  he  said  then,  and  it  happened 
that  a  genuine  emotion  of  angry  disappointment  sounded  out 
clear  upon  the  words,  instead  of  the  merely  polite  regret  they 
might  have  expressed. 

He  was  startled  at  the  sound  of  his  own  voice.  But  this 
was  nothing  to  the  effect  it  had  upon  the  girl.  It  roused  her, 
that  glint  of  naked  human  emotion,  as  the  crack  of  a  branch 
under  the  hunter's  foot  rouses  a  wild  animal.  Her  eyes  came 
to  life  again — her  face — her  body,  though  the  attitude  of  it  in 
the  chair  hardly  changed  perceptibly. 

Becoming  aware  of  the  difference  in  her,  he  let  the  con 
ventional  phrase  of  apology  for  his  outbreak,  that  was  upon 
his  tongue,  die  there.  There  was  a  moment  of  taut-stretched 
silence.  Then,  with  an  impatient  fling  of  her  body  that  turned 
her  face  away  from  him,  she  said: 

"Oh,  it's  all  false!  This  situation  between  you  and  me. 
False !  And  I  hate  false  things !  I  believe  you  hate  them,  too. 
We  aren't  meant  to  sit  and  talk.  That's  what  I  said  last  night. 
We're  meant  to  fight.  Tliat's  all  that  a  person  in  your  class 
and  a  person  in  mine  can  do/' 

"That's  nonsense!"  he  said  sharply.  "You  did  say  it  last 
night,  and  then  you  went  ahead  and  proved  that  it  wasn't  so 


120  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

by  talking  to  me,  wonderfully,  for  an  hour.  The  falseness 
isn't  in  our  trying  to  talk  to  each  other.  It's  in  pretending 
that  there  is  any  reason  why  we  can't." 

Now  that  the  ice  was  broken,  he  warmed  to  the  subject 
eagerly.  "That's  a  mighty  superficial  view  to  take  of  it,  it 
seems  to  me,"  he  went  on,  "talking  as  if  we  were  two  pawns 
of  opposite  colors  on  a  chess-board;  as  if  the  essential  facts 
were  that  I  was  nothing  but  a  wooden  symbol  of  my  class  and 
you  a  symbol  of  yours.  We're  both  human  beings  before  we're 
anything  else,  and  after  we've  been  everything  else.  You're 
Helena  .  .  ."  He  broke  off  there  with  a  smile  and  the 
explanation,  "I  have  seen  your  name  in  the  newspapers,  but 
I  don't  know  how  to  pronounce  it." 

"Galeece,"  she  told  him,  with  a  smile  of  her  own.  "And 
I  have  always  called  my  first  name  Heleena." 

"Well,"  he  went  on,  "and  I  am  Hugh  Corbett.  We  have 
Been  life  from  opposite  sides  almost,  as  you  say.  But  that 
only  makes  it  more  interesting  and  important,  in  a  way,  that 
we  should  try  to  understand  each  other." 

"We  never  could  do  it,"  she  said  in  a  tone  of  profound,  dis 
passionate  conviction.  "No  matter  how  hard  we  tried.  We 
haven't  enough  common  ground  to  begin  on." 

"But  we  have,"  he  contradicted  her.  "That's  another  thing 
you  proved  last  night — proved  it  up  to  the  hilt." 

"How?"  she  wanted  to  know.  Her  inflection  of  the  word 
was  skeptical,  but  she  turned  away  from  him  uneasily,  and  he 
thought  he  saw  a  heightened  color  in  her  face. 

"It  isn't  the  opinions  people  happen  to  have,  that  count  in 
a  case  like  that,"  he  said,  "any  more  than  it's  how  much  money 
they  happen  to  have.  What  makes  a  common  ground  between 
people  is  their  instincts — the  sort  of  things  they  find  they 
have  to  do  in  a  difficult  situation,  whether  it's  to  their  advan 
tage  or  not.  And  when  you  telephoned  last  night,  out  to  your 
headquarters,  to  tell  them  that  you  were  safe  and  they  needn't 
be  alarmed  about  you — did  that  instead  of  taking  the  advan 
tage  that  I  had  put  right  in  your  hands — of  the  chance  to 
make  them  think  you  had  been  kidnaped  again.  .  .  . 
Well,  you  did  the  sort  of  tiling  I  hope  I'd  have  done  in  the 


BIVEBDALE  121 

same  case.  It  was  a  piece  of  fine  sportsmanship,  that's  what 
it  was." 

With  another  of  her  sudden  movements  the  girl  turned  far 
ther  away  from  him,  so  that  he  could  not  see  her  face  at  all. 
The  expression  in  it  was  morose,  ironic,  contemptuous — but 
the  contempt  was  not  all  for  Hugh.  Her  involuntary  smile 
was  over  the  fact  that  his  interpretation  of  the  thing  she  had 
clone  could  be  so  nearly  right  and  yet  so  utterly  wrong. 

She  had  wanted  him,  passionately,  last  night,  not  to  leave 
her.  Her  whispered  invitation,  over  his  wounded  hand — an 
invitation  he  had  either  not  heard  or  else  misunderstood — had 
been  an  explicit  confession  of  this.  She  had  left  him  to  fling 
herself  down  on  the  divan  where  she  was  half-reclining  now, 
in  a  tempest  of  thwarted  desire  for  him.  All  that  her  father 
represented  to  her  in  her  life  she,  for  the  moment,  hated — 
sterile  ideals,  hardships,  self-denials.  These  revulsions  had 
come  over  her  before,  but  never  so  strongly.  She  was  sick 
of  the  strike  and  every  one  involved  in  it — sick  of  their  wrongs 
and  remedies.  She  wanted  to  be  clear  of  them  for  a  while, 
to  be  let  alone  so  that  her  thoughts  and  memories  and  imagin 
ings  could  wander  where  they  would.  And  to  bring  that  re 
sult  about  she  had  gone,  impatiently,  to  the  telephone  and  told 
them  at  headquarters  not  to  bother  about  her.  She  was  all 
right  and  would  turn  up  again  when  she  was  ready. 

She  had  been  at  war  with  herself  about  it  all  night  and  all 
to-day;  had  been  carrying  on  in  her  own  soul  the  same  sort 
of  bitter  recriminatory  quarrel  that  had  used  to  rage  between 
her  father  and  her  mother.  Her  father  was  defeated  but  he 
could  not  be  silenced.  It  was  he  who  spoke  now,  when,  after 
a  long  silence,  she  answered  Hugh. 

"It  was  not  good  sportsmanship,"  she  said.  "It  was  dis 
loyalty." 

Thereupon  it  broke  over  Hugh,  staggeringly,  that  he  had 
been  guilty  of  disloyalty  to  his  camp  in  giving  it  away  to 
Helena  that  they  had  a  spy  in  her  headquarters,  as,  by  admit 
ting  a  knowledge  of  her  telephone  message  last  night,  he  had 
done.  Confound  Greg  and  his  damned  detectives!  He  got 
up,  reluctantly,  to  go. 


123  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

She  did  not  rise ;  on  the  contrary,  leaned  back  a  little  far 
ther  upon  the  divan  where  she  sat,  in  order  to  look  up  at  him 
more  comfortably. 

"The  strike  does  make  it  awkward,  I  know/'  he  admitted. 
"The — the  friendship  I  want  between  us  would  be  misunder 
stood,  I  suppose,  by  both  sides.  Because,  just  now,  we  are  at 
war,  as  you  said.  But  the  strike  can  be  settled.  I  am  just  as 
confident  of  that  as  I  was  yesterday.  Settled  in  a  way  that 
will  leave  good  feeling  on  both  sides.  Meanwhile,  you  will 
find  that  we'll  fight  fair.  My  father  (he's  president  of  the 
company)  is  as  scrupulously  honorable  a  man  as  any  I  know. 
The  things  that  have  happened  to  you  out  there  have  been  *the 
result  of  a  misunderstanding.  You  can  be  perfectly  sure  that 
when  you  go  back  to  Eiverdale  you  "won't  be  molested.  That's 
what  I  came  out  to  tell  you  to-day.  I  won't  embarrass  you 
with,  the — the  personal  side  of  it,  until  the  strike's  over.  But 
when  it  is  over,  I  am  going  to  make  friends  with  you/' 

Still  she  did  not  rise — did  not  for  a  considerable  count  of 
seconds,  even  speak,  although  the  cadence  of  leave-taking  had 
been  unmistakable  in  his  last  words. 

At  last  she  said,  gazing  up  thoughtfully  into  his  face,  "If 
you  were  clever — oh,  supremely,  wickedly  clever — more  clever 
than  the  cleverest  man  I  have  ever  known — I  don't  think  you 
are,  but  if  you.  were — you'd  do  exactly  as  you  have  done  this 
afternoon,  and  as  you  did  last  night. 

"I'd  like  to  believe  you  were, "  she  went  on,  her  face  dark 
ening  with  her  voice,  as  she  spoke.  "I've  been  trying  to  make 
myself  "believe  it  ever  since  you  came."  She  stirred  restlessly, 
and  relaxed  a  little  deeper  into  the  cushions  of  the  divan. 
"But  T!  can't,"  she  acknowledged  with  an  ironic  flash  of  a 
smile.  "I  don't  suppose  you  can  see,  even  now,  why  it  is  that 
T  wish  it." 

The  look  of  complete  mystification  in  his  face  answered  for 
him. 

"You  think,"  she  went  on,  "that  you've  been  making  it 
easier  for  me  to  go  on  fighting  against  you  and  your  people, 
with  your"  promises  that  I  shall  not  be  molested.  You  don't 
see  that  you  are  taking  all  the  fight  out  of  me." 


EIVERDALE  123 

An  echo  came  to  his  ears  as  he  stared  down  at  her;  Greg 
ory's  "You've  accomplished  about  seven  times  as  much  as  Pad 
dock  could  have.  What  the  devil  did  you  do  to  her?"  He 
turned  abruptly  away  and  strode  over  to  the  window. 

"I've  lived  on  the  hatred  of  people  like  you  ever  since  I 
was  twelve  years  old,"  he  heard  her  saying.  "It  was  you  that 
made  us  poor  and  wretched.  It  was  you  that  persecuted  my 
father — buried  him  alive,  at  last.  It's  your  brutality  to  me 
and  to  people  of  my  kind  that  has  kept  me  going.  I've  gloried 
in  it ;  taken  a  joy  out  of  it.  The  only  joy  I've  had  has  been  in 
hating  you  and  defying  you — letting  you  see  that  there  were 
some  of  us  you  couldn't  make  cringe  to  you." 

There  was  the  old  thrill  in  this  for  Hugh — just  as  he  had 
felt  it  last  night  when  she  told  him  her  father's  story.  But 
the  next  thing  he  heard  reached  deeper  into  him  than  that. 

It  was  a  jerky  little  sigh.  "I  guess  I'm  wearing  out,"  she 
said  slackly.  "We  revolutionaries  go  that  way.  I've  seen  it 
happen  to  others — seen  them  turning  cautious  and  respectable. 
I  used  to  think  they'd  been  bought  off.  To-day  I've  been  un 
derstanding  them.  They  were  spent — burned  out.  I'm  won. 
dering  if  that  has  begun  to  happen  to  me.  I  tried  last  night 
to  make  myself  believe  that  you  had  just  been  playing  me  a 
trick,  and  that  I  saw  through  it  and  despised  you  for  it.  I 
couldn't.  I  couldn't  help  feeling  glad  that  you'd  taken  me 
away  from  those  beasts,  and  sorry  that  I'd  hurt  your  hand.  I 
couldn't  help  loving  that  big,  soft,  swift  car,  and  the  feeling 
that  went  along  with  it,  that  you  were — protecting  me ;  that 
nothing  bad  could  happen  to  me  while  you  were  there.  I 
despised  myself  for  feeling  that — but  it  didn't  do  any  good." 

"It's  horrible  that  any  one  should  have  had  to  live  a  life  in 
which  hate  was  the  only  decent  emotion  there  was  for  him.  to 
feel.  And  especially  a  person  like  you.  I  suppose,  though, 
that  nobody  but  a  person  like  you  could  have  done  it.  Any 
body  not  unconquerable  would  have  given  in.  How  it  makes 
me  feel  is  like  a  man  who  has  been  cheating  at  cards  without 
knowing  it — cards  that  were  stacked  in  his  favor  long  before 
the  game  began." 

There  was  the  ring  of  undisguised  passion  in  his  voice  and 


124:  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

it  thrilled  every  nerve-fiber  in  her  body.  It  was  no  mere 
abstract  sense  of  social  injustice,  she  knew,  that  made  him 
cry  out  like  that,  but  a  much  older  and  more  primitive  thing. 
He  wanted  her  just  as  she  wanted  him. 

She  rose  rather  slowly  and  came  across  the  room  to  him, 
halted  close  in  front  of  him,  within  reach  of  his  hands,  and 
bending  back  her  head,  looked  up  into  his  face.  Even  so,  she 
was  able  to  see  the  irrepressible  gesture  his  hands  made  toward 
her  before  they  dropped  to  his  sides  again. 

"Good-by,"  she  said.  "Oh,  no ! — Not  just  for  this  afternoon ! 
For  to-day  it  doesn't  matter.  I'm  not  sending  you  home.  I 
mean — good-by  for  good.  You  must  see  it.  All  our  talk 
to-day  has  enly  made  it  plainer,  that  that's  the  only  thing  for 
us  to  do.  You  know  it's  impossible — that  thing  you  call 
friendship — for  us.  We  should  only  destroy  each  other,  you 
and  I." 

He  did  not  answer,  and  the  silence  drew  itself  out  tighter 
and  tighter,  like  a  bow-string  in  the  notch  of  an  arrow. 

Whose  daughter  was  she  in  that  moment?  She  could  not 
herself  have  told.  She  believed  the  truth  of  everything  she 
had  said.  And  yet,  she  had  come  close — close  so  that  all  the 
magic  of  her  physical  loveliness  could  sway  his  senses.  Her 
own  were  under  a  spell,  too.  She  might  calculate,  but  she  was 
not  cold.  What  would  she  do  if  that  steely  resistance  of  his 
broke  down — if  he  said  "Destruction,  then !"  and  crushed  her 
in  a  close  embrace  ?  Would  she  obey  her  father  or  her  mother  ? 
Struggle,  or  rapturously  yield?  She  did  not  know. 

But  the  crisis  passed.  The  arrow  was  not  despatched.  With 
a  sudden  slackening  of  muscles,  she  turned  away. 

"I  have  never  met  any  one  like  you  before,"  she  said,  "and 
it's  not  likely  I  ever  shall  again.  It  will  be — just  as  well  for 
me  if  I  don't.  But  I'm  glad  I  did  meet  you  and — and  I'm 
sorry  I  hurt  your  hand." 

He  could  not  remember  afterward  what  ihcoherencies  of 
protest  against  her  decision,  and  determination  to  resist  it,  he 
had  stammered  out  at  that.  He  did  remember  her,  "Oh,  please 
go !  Go  now !"  which  had  terminated  the  scene. 

But  the  thing  that  had  paralyzed  all  his  motor  faculties,  had 


KIVEKDALE  125 

been  that  mad,  horrifying  impulse,  as  unexpected  as  the  leap 
from  ambush  of  a  wild  beast,  to  seize  her  in  his  arms,  as  she 
stood  there  so  close  before  him,  and  smother  those  last  words 
of  hers  in  kisses. 

The  thought  pursued  him  all  the  way  home.     It  was  ice 
and  fire.    He  shuddered  and  he  burned  at  the  touch  of  it. 


CHAPTER  IX 

HUGH  came  down  to  "breakfast  on  Monday  morning  with 
the  intention  of  going  out  to  Riverdale,  as  usual,  with 
the  others.  But  the  family  took  one  look  at  him  and 
collectively  imposed  a  veto.  When  a  big  healthy  man  like 
that  is  sick,  his  appearance  becomes  absolutely  calamitous. 
His  eyes  were  dry  with  fever,  and  the  generally  disastrous 
effect  was  heightened  by  an  unsuccessful  attempt  he  had  made 
to  shave  one-handed. 

None  but  his  mother  gave  any  particular  attention  to  his 
bandaged  fingers,  and  she  forbore  until  after  the  rest  had 
gone.  Then,  without  a  word,  she  reached  over,  laid  hold  of 
his  left  wrist  and  pushed  back  the  sleeve. 

Already  angry  red  streaks  were  visible  clear  to  the  elbow 
and  the  whole  hand  was  swollen. 

"What  did  that  young  devil  of  a  girl  do  to  you?"  she  de 
manded.  "Bite?" 

"Of  course  she  bit.  I  had  my  hand  over  her  mouth  so  she 
couldn't  scream.  I  don't  believe  it's  going  to  amount  to  any 
thing." 

Hugh  spoke  with  evident  relief.  He  had  expected  to  be  ques 
tioned  and  had  wondered,  uncomfortably,  whether  he  wouldn't 
lie  out  of  it.  It  had  seemed  so  intolerably  ludicrous  an  ad 
mission  to  make,  that  a  girl  had  bitten  him.  Having  his 
mother  take  his  secret  by  storm  like  that,  was  a  load  off  his 
fevered  mind. 

She  wanted  to  know  now  if  he  had  shown  it  to  a  doctor, 
and  on  being  informed  that  old  Hannah  was  the  only  surgical 
authority  that  had  been  appealed  to  in  the  case,  she  berated 
him,  in  her  best  manner,  for  a  fool,  for  a  minute  or  two,  or 
dered  him  back  to  bed,  and  went  straight  to  the  telephone. 

Hugh  obeyed  her  meekly,  for  he  was  sick  enough  by  that 

136 


BIVERDALE 

time  to  be  glad  to  have  it  on  an  official  basis.  The  doctor  who 
came  within  an  hour  found  him  with  a  temperature  of  a  hun 
dred  and  three  degrees  and  a  viciously  infected  wound.  Hugh 
was  in  bed  with  it  for  a  fortnight  and  there  were  two  weeks 
more  of  helpless  convalescence  after  that. 

That  month  was  an  important  experience  for  him.  He  had 
never  been  sick  before  since  childhood,  nor  disabled  in  any 
way.  There  had  never  been  anything  to  prevent  the  prompt 
translation  of  his  ideas  into  some  sort  of  action.  Now,  just 
at  the  moment  of  his  life  where  activity  seemed  most  neces 
sary  to  him,  he  was  forced  into  the  role  of  a  mere  passive  ob 
server.  He  was  intensely  observant  from  the  first,  even  when 
his  fever  projected  and  distorted  the  facts  he  observed  into 
grotesque  and  monstrous  shapes. 

The  family  attitude  toward  him — dictated  by  the  doctor, 
who  had  proscribed  excitement — was  encouraging — jovial — at 
times  facetious.  "Hello,  old  man!  You're  looking  immense 
this  morning.  Can't  keep  this  up  much  longer."  That  was 
the  note  of  it.  And  his  nurse  read  him  baseball  stories  out  of 
The  Saturday  Evening  Post.  No  one  would  talk  about  the 
progress  of  the  strike  with  him,  beyond  saying,  in  reply  to  his 
questions,  that  it  was  quieting  down  nicely.  There  was  noth 
ing  about  that  to  worry  about. 

And  yet,  somehow,  he  knew  about  it  all  the  while — knew 
that  it  was  being  fought  out  in  the  good  old  orthodox  way; 
that  hunger  and  hopelessness  were  being  relied  upon  just  as 
they  had  been  relied  on,  for  the  last  hundred  }rears,  "to  bring 
fools  to  their  senses."  That  all  the  time-hallowed  tactics  of 
a  thousand  strikes  were  being  employed  to  give  verisimili 
tude  to  the  pretense  that  production  was,  substantially,  on  a 
normal  basis  again  and  the  strike  "practically"  broken. 

During  unnumbered  hours,  as  he  lay  there,  he  occupied 
himself  with  solutions  of  his  own.  Fantastic  solutions,  of 
course,  when  his  fever  was  high,  as  he  recognized  when  it 
cooled.  But  even  about  the  ideas  that  came  to  him  after  the 
fever  had  gone  away  he  could  feel  no  confidence — not  enough 
anyhow  to  nerve  him  to  the  task  of  breaking  through  the  taboo 
the  family  had  established  and  forcing  a  discussion. 


128  AN  AMERICAN  FAMILY 

But,  after  all,  the  strike,  though  it  was  the  largest  object 
in  the  landscape  his  inner  eye  surveyed,  was  a  long  way  of! 
and  there  was  a  lot  of  foreground  in  between.  There  was 
nothing  important  about  this  foreground ;  it  was  merely  the 
daily  life  and  ways  of  his  family,  the  organization  of  the 
household,  habitual  things,  services  taken  for  granted — the 
family  gesture  and  the  family  idiom.  Except  in  unusual  cir 
cumstances  or  to  an  abnormal  mood,  all  this  is  as  invisible 
as  air. 

Hugh's  mood  was  abnormal.  Something  had  happened  that 
sensitized  his  perception  to  all  these  things.  He  saw  them  as 
if  he  were  some  one  to  whom  they  were  all  quite  new — as  one 
who  took  nothing  for  granted.  He  saw  them  somewhat  as 
Helena  Galicz  would  have  seen  them,  or,  at  any  rate,  a  girl 
like  his  notion  of  Helena  Galicz. 

A  good,  wholesome,  old-fashioned  Americanism  was  the 
family  tradition  of  the  Corbetts.  They  never  went  in  for 
smartness  or  anglomania.  Bob's  devotion  to  polo,  for  exam 
ple,  was  looked  at  a  little  askance — was  felt  to  run  near  the 
boundary  line  of  the  permissible,  and  came  in  for  a  good  deal 
of  only  half  good-natured  derision;  whereas  Gregory's  and 
young  Carter's  fame  at  football  were  matters  of  unmixed 
family  pride.  Harriet  Aldrich's  marriage  to  an  Italian  count, 
and  Christine  Crawford's  to  an  English  younger  son  who 
might  quite  possibly  come  into  an  earldom,  were  felt  to  be 
regrettable  experiments.  It  was  fortunate  that  neither  Con 
stance  nor  Anne  had  tried  to  pull  off  anything  like  that.  All 
of  them,  with  the  exception  of  Robert,  Senior,  whose  rather 
pathetic  longing  to  be  a  landed  gentleman  was  steadily  ig 
nored  by  the  rest,  were  convinced  that  they  were,  and  took  a 
pride  in  being,  genuinely  democratic.  Even  Hugh,  who  ques 
tioned  most  things,  had  never  questioned  this  until  now. 

But  he  saw  now,  or  thought  he  did  (he  was  hypersensitive, 
no  doubt,  by  way  of  compensation  for  his  former  blindness), 
how  thin  a  pretense  that  form  of  democracy  was.  They  were 
a  privileged  lot,  just  as  Helena  had  said.  They  took  it  for 
granted  that  society  should  be  organized  in  their  favor.  They 
expected  to  be  well  served ;  they  wanted  the  best  of  everything 


EIVEBDALB 

as  a  matter  of  course,  and  they  didn't  expect  to  be  put  to  any 
trouble  to  get  it. 

He  heard  that  arrogant  expectation  speaking  in  about  half 
the  things  they  said;  saw  it  swaggering  in  the  hundred  un 
conscious  things  they  did  during  a  day.  Why,  their  very  de 
mocracy  was  a  form  of  swagger!  It  exasperated  Hugh,  in 
the  light  of  that  new  point  of  view  he'd  got  from  Helena  the 
night  of  the  kidnaping — of  what  she'd  said  of  slave-owners 
who  were  not  like  Simon  Legree — good-humored  slave-owners 
who  liked  to  do  the  decent  thing. 

He  had  another  source  of  annoyance  against  his  family, 
too.  But  it  was  one  he  would  not  look  at  quite  so  squarely. 
Not  once,  since  his  mother's  blunt,  "What  did  that  devil  of  a 
girl  do  ?  Bite  ?"  had  any  member  of  the  family — not  even  his 
incorrigible  old  grandfather — made  the  slightest  reference  to 
the  cause  of  his  injury.  For  anything  any  of  them  said  to 
him  during  their  cheery  little  daily  visits,  he  might  have  been 
suffering  from  some  obscure  nervous  lesion.  Of  course  a  con 
certed  silence  like  that  speaks  loud.  They  had  held  councils 
over  him  and  it  had  been  decided  to  take  a  line — diplomacy 
was  at  work.  Helena  Galicz  was  being  elaborately  dismissed 
from  the  universe. 

But  one  day  he  had  a  letter  from  her.  He  had  been  worry 
ing  over  what  she  would  think  of  his  disappearance  from  her 
life — in  the  face  of  his  vehement  refusal  to  withdraw  from 
it — but  it  had  not  occurred  to  him  that  it  would  be  possible 
to  explain  it  to  her.  In  his  imagination,  she  had  dematerial- 
ized  into  that  chaotic  void  from  which  she  had  momentarily 
appeared  to  him. 

So  the  mere  fact  that  here  in  his  hand  was  a  letter  that  her 
hand  had  written  and  that  the  date  line  at  the  head  of  it 
showed  her  still  to  be  living  in  the  little  flat  where  he  had 
visited  her  that  Sunday  afternoon — the  surmise  that  it  would 
be  possible  for  him  to  talk  to  her  to-day — possibly  this  moment, 
over  the  telephone — was  tremendous  enough.  And  as  for  the 
contents  of  the  letter  .  .  .1 

He  was  in  Ms  mother's  sitting-room,  clad  in  a  bathrobe 
and  packed  round  with  pillows  in  an  easy  chair,  when  a  maid, 


130  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

bringing  in  his  mother's  mail,  handed  one  of  the  many  letters 
to  him. 

"Here/'  Mrs.  Robert  said,  "let  me  open  that  for  you." 

It  was  a  natural  offer  to  make,  for  with  one  hand  a  mere 
sling-supported  mass  of  wet  bandages  and  drainage  tubes,  the 
slitting  of  an  envelope  and  the  extrication  of  a  letter  from  it 
is  a  complex  and  laborious  matter. 

Hugh's  sharp  disinclination  to  let  his  mother  do  him  this 
email  service  took  him  by  surprise.  He  hesitated,  palpably, 
before  he  put  the  letter  into  Mrs.  Corbett's  outstretched  hand. 
She  took  it,  however,  as  if  she  had  noticed  nothing  of  the  sort, 
ripped  it  open  and  handed  it  back,  and  instantly  plunged 
into  her  own  mail. 

For  half  an  hour  she  remained,  to  all  appearance,  completely 
absorbed  in  it,  but  in  the  whole  of  that  time  she  never  missed 
a  move  of  her  son's  nor  a  nuance  of  his  expression.  She 
marked  the  tremor  of  his  hand  as  he  took  the  letter  from  hers ; 
the  checked  movement  to  put  it,  unread,  into  his  pocket,  the 
lapse  of  minutes  before  he  began  to  read  and  the  sudden 
cessation  of  reading  at  the  end  of  a  line  or  two.  She  saw  in 
the  set  of  his  muscles  the  half-translated  impulse  to  get  up 
and  walk  out  of  the  room  and  the  relaxed  abandonment  of  it. 
She  saw  the  swift  flight  of  his  eye  in  search  of  the  meaning 
of  a  page  and  then  the  slow,  word  by  word  drinking  of  it  in 
after  the  first  suspense  was  satisfied.  But  it  was  not  until 
the  letter  had  lain  for  five  minutes  safely  in  Hugh's  pocket 
that  she  looked  up  at  him. 

"Well,"  she  asked  then;  "what  has  she  got  to  say?  Sorry 
she  bit?" 

"Oh,  yes,  it's  from  her,"  Hugh  said.  "And  it's  mostly  about 
that.  It  has  worried  her,  though  I  don't  see  why  it  should." 

He  was  surprised  as  well  as  pleased  at  the  sound  of  his 
voice — the  casual,  conversational  tone  and  inflection  of  it.  He 
had  not  been  sure,  when  he  started,  whether  any  voice  would 
come  at  all,  because  the  unmistakable,  undisguised  implica 
tions  of  that  letter  had  bewildered  and  thrilled  and  frightened 
him  so  that  he  could  not  tell  which  emotion  was  which. 


EIVERDALE  131 

"Now  that  they  tell  me  you  are  safe/'  she  had  written,  "I 
have  the  heart  to  write  to  you.  I  think  of  you  as  hating  me 
the  way  I  would  hate  any  one  who  had  done  that  to  me,  but 
then  I  remember  how  different  you  are  in  ways  like  that  from 
any  one  I  have  ever  met  and  I  wonder  if  perhaps  you  have — 
in  that  mysterious  way  of  yours  which  I  can  not  understand — 
gone  on  thinking  of  me  without  any  hate  at  all. 

"I  do  not  ask  you  to  forgive  me,  forgiveness  being  one  of 
those  Christian  hypocrisies  I  hate.  Yet  there  were  two  days 
when  I  found  myself  wishing  I  were  a  Christian — or  any 
thing  else  that  could  pray  or  burn  a  candle  for  your  recovery. 
That  was  when  there  was  talk  that  they  might  have  to  ampu 
tate  the  hand.  I  saw  you  in  my  dreams — like  that.  You  see 
I  have  expiated — a  little. 

"It  was  nearly  a  week  before  I  heard  of  your  sickness  at 
all.  Since  then,  through  Alice,  who  has  a  friend  who  was  able 
to  ask,  I  have  had  news  every  day.  Often  I  have  walked  past 
that  great  frowning  house  of  yours.  You  are  incrediblr 
enough  without  that. 

"I  have  nothing  to  do  with  the  strike  any  more.  I  have 
been  out  once  or  twice  to  Eiverdale,  but  I  have  no  heart  in  it, 
and  they,  I  think,  have  lost  confidence  in  me.  "Well,  they  are 
right  to  do  that.  I  have  gone  to  work  translating  a  Russian 
novel  for  one  of  the  Yiddish  papers  in  New  York,  and  I  am 
offered  a  job  of  book-reviewing  for  a  German  paper  here 
in  Chicago,  so  you  see  I  am  busy  enough.  For  the  time,  I  shall 
live  here  with  Alice  who  has  a  spare  room  for  me  through  the 
summer. 

"Even  if  you  hate  me,  will  you  write  a  line,  just  to  say 
you  have  received  this  letter  and  keep  me  from  wondering? 
And  if  you  do  not,  will  you  come  to  see  me  again?  Or  tele 
phone  and  say  where  I  can  come  to  you? 

"I  did  wrong  to  send  you  away.  It  was  wise  and  prudent 
to  do  it ;  but  some  things,  it  says  in  your  New  Testament,  are 
hidden  from  the  wise  and  prudent. 

"Your  'friend' — if  you  want  her, 

"HELENA  GALICZ." 


132  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

One  solid  advantage  that  large  rough  persons  enjoy  is  that 
they  are  never  suspected  of  being  tactful.  "She  knows  you've 
been  sick,  does  she  ?"  said  Hugh's  mother.  "How  do  you  sup 
pose  she  found  out  about  it  ?" 

This  was  the  one  thing  in  the  letter  that  Hugh  could  talk 
about.  He  explained  at  length  and  at  random  who  Alice 
Hayes  was  and  what  sort  of  newspaper  work  she  did,  and  he 
went  on  to  speculate  with  what  he  felt  to  be  just  the  right 
shade  of  casual  interest  as  to  what  her  source  of  authentic 
information  about  the  Corbett  family  was.  And  this  led  him  to 
a  genuine  digression.  "It  was  real  inside  dope,  all  right," 
he  said.  "She  knew  more  about  it  than  I  did.  No  one  had 
told  me  that  there  was  talk  of  amputation/' 

But  he  added  in  the  next  breath,  "I'm  sorry  she  heard  about 
that.  ("She,"  in  this  sentence,  was  not  Alice  Hayes.)  It 
wasn't  her  fault,  of  course,  but  it  gave  her  a  beastly  three  or 
four  days." 

There  is  no  use  drawing  a  herring  across  the  trail  if  you 
give  the  chase  a  view  of  the  fox  at  the  same  time. 

"I  suppose  so,"  his  mother  said,  and  stopped  there,  though 
there  were  wonderful  words  on  her  tongue.  There  sat  this 
son  of  hers,  the  one  she  loved  best  of  all  of  them,  innocent  of 
all  concern  as  to  what  her  own  feelings  must  have  been  during 
those  two  or  three  dreadful  days,  worrying  over  the  putative 
sufferings  of  the  gutter-snipe  who  had  made  all  the  trouble. 

Even  the  tone  of  her  voice  must  have  satisfied  him  of  her 
sympathy  for  the  jam  broke  and  the  logs  came  down  with  a 
rush.  He  had  been  thinking  about  the  girl  for  weeks  and 
never  spoken  of  her  to  a  soul.  His  mother  got  it  all.  The 
look  of  her  as  she  rode  along  to  address  the  meeting,  and  the 
way  she  had  looked  at  other  times.  The  story  of  her  life  as 
she  had  told  it  to  him  in  the  car.  The  strange  and  troubling 
novelty  of  her  ideas.  The  amazing  education  she  had  managed 
to  get  for  herself;  her  linguistic  accomplishments.  "She 
makes  me  feel  like  an  ignorant  young  schoolboy — though 
she's  five  years  younger  than  I." 

The  almost  unbearably  exasperating  thing  about  it  all  to 
(Mrs.  Corbett  was  that  Hugh  evidently  believed  that  he  was 


KIVERDALE  133 

exhibiting  a  completely  impersonal  detachment,  amusing  his 
mother  with  a  character  sketch  of  the  sort  of  person  her  own 
orbit  didn't  bring  her  into  contact  with.  The  wire  edge  of 
emotion  in  his  voice  and  the  tension  revealed  by  his  gestures 
were  grotesquely  set  off  by  the  carefully  casual  phrases  of  tea- 
table  chatter.  And  it  was  not  a  pose  he  had  taken  deliberately, 
either.  He  believed — or  half-believed  it. 

Why — why  were  they  made  like  that  ?  All  the  best  of  them, 
anyhow,  What  purpose  of  a  benignant  Creator  was  served 
by  letting  this  sex  thing  strike  from  ambush?  Why  could 
not  a  nice  clean  boy  like  this  be  given  a  fair  chance  ? 

She  stood  it  as  long  as  she  could.  Then  she  ended  a 
thoughtful  silence  he  had  fallen  into  by  saying  briskly : 

"Hugh,  will  you  run  away  with  me  ?" 

He  started,  as  she  had  expected  him  to,  and  flushed  dark 
red.  "Kun  away  ?"  he  repeated  blankly. 

"For  the  summer/'  she  explained.  "I  don't  care  where; 
Norway  if  you  like.  Just  the  two  of  us." 

He  laughed  uneasily.    "That's  a  wild  idea,"  he  said. 

"I  don't  see  anything  wild  about  it,"  she  argued.  "You're 
out  of  a  job.  Your  grandfather  has  shut  down  on  the  wel 
fare  work.  You're  sick  of  the  family  and  I'm  feeling  a  bit 
that  way  myself.  It's  a  thing  that  takes  us  all  once  in  a 
while  .  .  .  ." 

But  under  his  keen  dark  stare  she  felt  the  plausible  geni 
ality  dying  out  of  her  voice,  and  at  that  point  the  sentence 
itself  died. 

"Is  there  any  special  reason  why  you  want  me  to  go?"  he 
asked. 

"You  can't  stare  me  out  of  countenance,"  said  his  mother. 
"There  is  a  reason,  and  you  know  it." 

"I  know  what  it  is,"  he  retorted,  "but  it's  not  what  I'd  call  a 
reason.  Because  I  saw  fit  to  prevent  a  dirty  outrage  like 
that  kidnaping,  you  think  I  am  in  danger  of  making  a 
fool  of  myself  about  the  girl — disgracing  the  family  name  and 
so  on.  The  family  name  would  have  been  nicely  spattered, 
I  tell  you,  if  I  hadn't  prevented  it.  But  the  correct  thing  to 
do  is  to  carry  me  off  to  Europe  to  get  over  it.  I  wouldn't 


134  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

have  put  a  notion  like  that  past  Greg  to  think  up,  or  Bob. 
But  I  didn't  expect  it  of  you/' 

She  sat  still  and  let  him  fume. 

"Oh,  it  makes  me  tired  I"  he  burst  out  again.  "I  tell  you 
I've  got  hold  of  something  new.  I've  just  begun  to  wake  up. 
That  welfare  work  of  mine  was  all  wrong.  Or  at  least,  the 
way  I  went  at  it  was.  I  don't  wonder  it  made  them  wild. 
There  are  things  I  never  knew  existed,  that  I  want  to  find 
out  about.  Helena  Galicz  (the  name  bothered  him,  but  he 
managed  to  get  it  out)  can  tell  me  some  of  them,  and  I'm 
going  to  make  her  do  it.  But  this  notion  that  just  because 
I  don't  keep  my  mind  hermetically  sealed  like  a  can  of  toma 
toes  that  would  spoil  if  the  air  got  at  it,  just  because  I  am 
willing  to  look  around  and  see  what's  happening,  and  treat 
people  like  human  beings,  whether  they  happen  to  belong  to 
'our  set'  or  not — the  notion  that  because  of  that  I  am  dan 
gerous  ;  in  need  of  a  guardian — carried  off  to  Norway  .  .  . 
Good  lord,  mother !  That's  Greg  at  his  worst ;  or  Bob.  But 
you  ought  to  know  better.  I'm  not  in  the  habit  of  running 
after  women,  am  I?" 

"You're  a  good  boy,  Hugh,"  she  said,  and  her  tone  held  him 
silent  until  she  was  ready  to  go  on.  "But  any  man  in  the 
world  can  make  a  mess  of  his  life  over  a  woman.  If  he's  in 
the  habit  of  it,  as  you  say,  he's  in  a  way  safer.  Take  Bob,  if 
you  like.  I've  worried  about  him  a  lot.  But  he'll  come  out  all 
right — or  pretty  well,  anyhow,  in  the  end.  When  he  marries 
it  will  be  the  right  sort  of  girl  .  .  ." 

He  snatched  that  phrase  from  her  angrily.  "Some  society 
fluff!"  he  commented. 

"Oh,  likely  enough,"  his  mother  agreed.  "But  in  things 
that  matter  she'll  be — our  kind  of  person.  And  he'll  probably 
be  faithful  to  her — pretty  faithful,  anyway,  and  they'll  manage 
it.  And  some  day,  I  suppose,  Greg  will  get  his  widow." 

(This  is  a  chapter  in  the  Corbctt  annals  to  which  I  have 
not  referred.  Greg  had  fallen  in  love  at  twenty-five,  perma 
nently,  invincibly,  with  a  girl  who  presently  had  decided  that 
she  preferred  another  man — a  painter.  But  within  three 
months  of  the  marriage  the  painter  had  died  suddenly  and 


EIVERDALE  135 

Greg  cautiously  renewed  his  suit.  She  liked  him,  came  to 
him  for  advice  and  go  on  and  eventually,  as  was  apparent  to 
everybody  but  Greg,  was  going  to  make  up  her  mind  to  marry 
him.  His  conduct  was  conceded  to  be  admirable,  but  the 
family  found  it  dull.) 

"She's  a  sentimental  little  fool,"  Mrs.  Corbett  went  on,  "but 
that  will  be  just  what  Greg  likes.  So  he's  all  right.  But  you 
...  I'm  frightened  about  you,  Hugh.  That's  the  truth." 

"Well,  you  needn't  be  frightened  about  this  girl,"  he  told 
her.  "Heavens !  I've  only  seen  her  twice." 

He  threw  off  the  rug  that  lay  across  his  knees  and  moved 
to  get  up.  "I'm  going  to  telephone,"  he  explained,  in  answer 
to  his  mother's  look  of  interrogation. 

"Do  it  right  here,"  she  said,  with  a  glance  at  the  instrument 
on  her  desk. 

She  saw  the  blood  come  up  into  his  face  again,  as  he  hesi 
tated,  casting  about  for  an  excuse.  Then,  with  sudden  pity, 
and  over  a  lump  in  her  throat,  she  added,  "I'm  going  out. 
I'd  no  idea  we'd  been  talking  away  so  long." 

He  called  after  her  as  she  retreated  toward  her  bedroom, 
"We'll  think  about  that  Norway  trip,  mother.  Maybe  we'll 
take  it  after  all." 

But  that  project,  as  it  happened,  did  not  come  up  again. 

Mrs.  Corbett  shut  her  door  behind  her  and  did  not  appear 
again  that  morning.  One  disadvantage  that  a  big,  rough 
woman  like  that  labors  under  is  that  she  never  gets  anything 
by  crying  for  it ;  a  fact  that  no  one  knew  better  than  this  one. 


CHAPTER  X 

MRS.  CORBETT  was  right  in  one  of  her  predictions,  at 
any  rate.  The  strike  did  kill  old  Gregory.  To  put 
the  thing  in  a  different,  and  perhaps  truer,  fashion,  it 
enabled  him  to  live  all  the  life  he  had  left  in  the  space  of  a 
few  close-packed,  intensely  vivid  weeks,  whereas  at  the  placid 
jogging  pace  he  had  declined  into  before  the  strike  began,  he 
might  have  eked  it  out  for  two  or  three  years.  Perhaps,  after 
all,  it  did  him  a  service.  There  is  no  doubt  he  enjoyed  that 
last  fight — the  reawakening  of  forgotten  faculties — the  re 
sumption  of  the  old  authority. 

To  the  new  school  men  in  the  organization — men  like  How 
ard  and  Bailey — he  was  a  revelation.  For  years  they  had  been 
regarding  him  as  an  amiable  old  nuisance,  smiling  over  his 
contrarieties  when  they  could,  swearing  when  they  must,  and 
wondering  in  their  heart  of  hearts  how  the  enterprise  had  ever 
managed  to  grow  to  the  enormous  thing  it  was  under  his 
hands.  Now  they  gazed  at  him  with  undisguised  awe.  The 
decisions  of  his  mind  were  like  the  miraculous  ax-strokes  of 
a  skilled  woodsman,  swift,  heavy,  trenchant,  and  of  an  ac 
curacy  they  found  uncanny.  They  understood  now  why  Cor- 
bett  &  Company  had  grown  to  the  thing  it  was. 

They  saw  him,  to  tell  the  truth,  at  a  little  better  than  his 
best.  This  new  attitude  of  theirs — of  all  indeed  who  worked 
behind  him,  for  the  old-timers  who  remembered  were  glowing 
with  pride  in  him — was  oxygen  to  his  old  lungs.  He  glowed 
with  it. 

It  is  probably  fair  to  say  that  those  last  active  weeks  of  his 
were  the  best  of  his  life.  Of  course  he  had  to  pay  the  price. 
The  new  heady  wine  was  too  much  for  the  old  bottle. 

Riding  home  from  work  in  the  car  with  him  one  late  June 
afternoon,  young  Gregory  noticed  that  the  old  man  was  getting 

136 


EIYERDALE  137 

drowsy,  his  speecli  thickening,  and,  looking  at  him,  saw  that 
his  face  was  flushed.  By  the  time  they  got  him  home,  he  had 
to  be  almost  carried  up  to  bed ;  and  when  the  doctor  arrived 
an  hour  later,  his  diagnosis  was  hardly  needed,  the  apoplectic 
nature  of  the  seizure  was  so  plainly  apparent. 

Old  Gregory  did  not  die  for  more  than  a  month.  But  he 
never  recovered  full  consciousness  again,  nor  articulate  speech ; 
though  sometimes  they  thought  he  recognized  one  of  them 
momentarily.  Two  nurses  took  possession  of  him.  His  life 
was  over. 

And  yet  he  could  not  be  mourned  as  dead,  The  fiction  of 
his  possible  recovery,  or  partial  recovery,  must  be  kept  up. 
Such  a  situation  is  nerve-wearing  at  the  best.  And  in  this 
case  of  the  Corbetts,  it  was  complicated,  first  by  the  strike, 
and  second  by  Hugh.  And  both  these  complications  they  felt 
they  owed  to  Helena  Galicz. 

On  the  subject  of  the  strike  Hugh  had  one  long  and  thor 
oughly  futile  scene  with  his  father.  It  took  place  in  old  Greg 
ory's  office  out  at  the  plant,  Hugh  having  formally  asked  for 
an  appointment  and  security  against  interruptions.  He  spent 
a  good  many  hours  preparing  for  it,  too;  marshalling  his 
arguments. 

What  he  wanted  to  convince  his  father  of  was  that  the  sort 
of  victory  their  present  methods  were  intended  to  accomplish 
would  be  disastrous  even  if  they  attained  it.  The  backbone 
of  contention  was  the  refusal  on  the  part  of  the  officers  of  the 
company  to  deal  with  any  organization,  or  in  any  way  to  recog 
nize  the  existence  of  any  organization  among  the  operatives. 

Hugh  was  for  abandoning  this  line  altogether.  He  would 
treat  with  the  organization,  such  as  it  was.  Indeed,  he  would 
go  further  and  refuse  to  treat  with  anything  but  an  organiza 
tion.  He  would  facilitate  organization  in  every  possible  way 
— -not  only  as  a  means  of  settling  the  strike,  but  after  the 
strike  was  settled.  He  believed  that  eventually  most  of  his 
own  discarded  welfare  activities  could  be  turned  over  to  the 
administration  of  the  men  themselves.  !pe  even  worked  out 
the  scheme  in  considerable  detail. 

Of  course  in  his  talk  with  his  father  he  never  got  as  far 


138  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

as  that.  For  Hugh's  mere  approach  to  the  subject  looked  to 
Robert,  Senior's,  horrified  eyes  like  rampant  anarchy.  Really, 
I  believe  Hugh  would  have  come  nearer  succeeding  with  his 
grandfather. 

It  would  be  unfair  to  characterize  Robert  Corbett  as  a  mere 
bundle  of  negations.  He  had  real  abilities.  His  judgment  in 
many  matters  was  better  than  his  father's;  his  thinking  was 
of  a  closer,  finer  grain.  Given  a  decent  chance,  he  might  have 
made  a  solid  if  not  a  brilliant  name  for  himself. 

But  he  had  no  such  luck.  He  was  cursed  with  a  thin  skin, 
and  from  childhood  he  had  always  winced  at  the  things  his 
father  did  and  said  and  thought.  The  old  Gregory  that  you 
have  seen,  mellowed  by  age  and  success,  was  a  very  different 
person  from  the  one  his  son  remembered.  Back  in  his  forties 
the  founder  of  the  Corbetts  had  been  a  harsh,  unlovely  char 
acter;  his  domestic  outlook  as  narrow  as  his  business  outlook 
had  been  broad — his  manner  uncouth,  loud-voiced,  his  humor 
ferociously  heavy-handed.  It  had  taken  genuine  courage  and 
determination  on  Robert's  part  to  win  a  college  education. 
Gregory  characterized  college  boys  broadly,  as  a  pack  of  damn 
fools — empty-headed  dudes,  and  so  on. 

Granted  a  boy  with  any  stuff  in  him  at  all  this  sort  of  thing 
was  bound  to  produce  a  reaction.  And  it  did  in  Robert's  case. 
He  grew  up  with  the  passionate  desire  to  be  everything  that 
his  father  was  not — deliberately  perfected  his  speech  and 
manners ;  discovered  and  indulged  a  fondness  for  good  books, 
and,  eventually,  for  good  pictures.  In  a  word,  whatsoever 
things  were  lovely  and  of  good  report.  The  good  report  was 
essential. 

(Why,  do  you  ask,  did  he  marry  the  wife  that  he  did  ?  Well, 
to  begin  with,  that  barytone  voice  which  had  awed  and  fasci 
nated  little  Jean  Gilbert  the  first  time  she  had  heard  it  speak, 
was,  when  the  owner  of  it  was  twenty,  a  ravishing,  creamy  con 
tralto,  and  the  owner  of  it  as  splendidly  beautiful  a  creature  as 
a  man  might  find  in  a  lifetime.  She  was  well-bred,  too — an 
old  Philadelphia  stock  that  had  been  growing  in  the  fertile 
soil  of  wealth  and  leisure  since  before  the  Revolution.  Her 
rather  outrageous  ways  were  really  a  revolt  against  the  finicky 


EIVERDALE  139 

niceness  of  her  family,  just  as  Robert's  mannerliness  was  a  re 
volt  against  his  father's  violence.  And  then,  there  was  a  gen 
uine  want  in  him  for  her  free-moving  strength  and  her  out 
spoken  courage.) 

The  least  real  thing  about  Robert  was  his  liberalism — the 
most  purely  negative  thing.  But,  since  it  had  never  been  put 
to  the  test  of  action,  he  had  believed  in  it  for  thirty  years. 
Things  fell  out  perversely  for  him,  it  may  be  admitted.  His 
father's  sudden  assumption  of  authority  at  the  outbreak  of 
the  strike  put  him  in  an  awkward,  uncomfortable  situation, 
and  the  old  gentleman's  instantaneous  removal  in  the  midst 
of  it,  left  him  in  a  worse  one — several  degrees  worse,  as  a  mat 
ter  of  fact,  than  if  the  strike  had  killed  his  father  outright. 
He  had  been  dreaming  for  years  of  the  things  he  would  do 
when  the  power  came  into  his  hands — handsome,  philanthropic 
things  that  would  be  acclaimed  with  grateful  joy  by  the  oper 
atives  themselves,  and  perhaps  editorialized  by  the  newspapers 
— of  the  inauguration  of  a  recognizable  new  era  of  good  feel 
ing  to  the  confounding  of  agitators  and  such. 

It  was  exasperating,  therefore,  to  have  it  work  out  like  this 
and  to  find  himself  put  in  the  position  by  the  one  of  his  own 
sons  from  whom  he  had  expected  complete  sympathy  and 
agreement,  of  a  hard-fisted  tory  reactionary.  If  the  men 
would  repent,  abandon  their  misguided  ways  and  come  back 
to  work,  they  would  find  no  one  readier  to  take  a  liberal  atti 
tude  than  he.  But  to  talk  of  concessions  now  was  preposter 
ous.  Such  talk,  besides,  came  with  particularly  bad  grace  from 
Hugh,  since  it  was  his  ill-considered  experiments  that  had 
caused  the  trouble. 

The  scene  went  as  badly  as  possible  from  the  first.  Hugh 
was  never  quite  at  ease  with  his  father;  always  became,  by 
contagion,  ceremonious  and  elaborate  and,  in  the  exasperation 
of  finding  himself  so,  incapable  of  saying  the  things  he  wanted 
to  say. 

By  the  end  of  an  Hour  they  were  deadlocked  in  a  state  of 
cold  anger.  Hugh  had,  by  polite  implication,  been  accused  of 
having  caused  his  grandfather's  fatal  seizure,  of  having  dis 
credited  the  family  name,  and,  at  last,  of  wilfully  blinding 


140  AN"   AMEKICAN   FAMILY 

himself  to  all  considerations  of  reason  and  propriety  in  a  re 
grettable  infatuation  over  a  woman  of  a  type  which  his  father 
was  unwilling  even  to  attempt  to  characterize. 

At  this  point,  Hugh,  who  had  been  on  his  feet,  abruptly 
seated  himself  at  the  desk  opposite  his  father,  pulled  up  a 
writing-pad,  dipped  pen  in  ink,  wrote  out  a  formal  resignation 
from  Corbett  &  Company,  addressed  to  his  father  as  presi 
dent,  and  left  the  room. 

The  break  need  have  gone  no  further.  There  is  nothing 
inevitable  about  these  lives  of  ours,  unless  one  is  willing  to 
believe  that  the  minute  events  and  coincidences  of  them  were 
all  written  down  in  imperishable  books  before  the  world  began. 
A  dozen  circumstances  that  might,  apparently,  have  happened 
fully  as  easily  as  those  that  did,  would  have  altered  matters 
materially  for  Hugh. 

One  of  these  is  the  trivial  coincidence  that  lie  was  with 
Helena  ©n  the  afternoon  they  brought  his  grandfather  home, 
apparently  dying.  It  was  at  Alice  Hayes'  flat  that  they 
reached  him  on  the  telephone  and  summoned  him  home.  There 
was  a  touch  of  drama  about  that  that  impressed  them  all,  in 
cluding  Hugh  himself.  It  was  one  of  those  facts  that  fly  to 
their  marks  like  arrows.  It  gave  to  old  Gregory's  seizure  the 
look  of  a  heavenly  expression  of  disapproval  of  his  grandson's 
wilful  misbehavior.  It  was  the  sort  of  thing  people  lower 
their  voices  to  speak  about.  The  fact  that,  against  all  reason, 
Hugh  experienced  a  touch  of  this  feeling  himself,  made  him 
the  more  sensitive  to,  and  resentful  of,  its  effect  on  the  others. 

That  resentment  was  heavily  responsible  for  the  quarrel 
with  his  father.  On  top  of  that  quarrel,  his  mother  made 
what  was,  I  am  inclined  to  think,  a  blunder.  Hugh  came 
home  from  it  in  one  of  those  still  rages  of  his,  determined  on 
packing  a  trunk  and  getting  out  of  the  house,  for  a  while,  at 
any  rate.  She  resisted  this  determination  with  every  weapon 
she  had — and  these  were  many  and  formidable.  She  under 
stood  him  better  than  any  one  else  and  did  not  at  all  under 
rate  the  pressure  of  the  emotion  his  quiet  manner  concealed. 
She  spent  half  an  hour  deliberately  goading  and  taunting  him, 
and  eventually  managed  to  provoke  the  explosion  she  wanted. 


RIVEKDALE  141 

There  was  none  of  the  ordinary  maternal  and  filial  inhibi 
tions  between  this  pair.  Hugh  could  talk  to  her  as  he  could 
talk  to  no  one  else,  and  after  he  had  turned  loose  and  told  her, 
in  terms  which  I  shall  not  venture  to  report,  exactly  how  he 
felt  about  all  the  members  of  his  family — severally  and  col 
lectively — herself,  his  father,  his  brothers,  and  his  sister  Anne 
— who  had  heard  dire  rumors  of  what  was  in  the  wind,  and 
had  been  silly  enough  to  presume  upon  her  status  as  a  married 
woman  and  write  him  a  chiding  letter — after  he  had  got 
through  all  that,  he  felt,  in  spite  of  himself,  better. 

Whereupon  his  mother  turned  good-humored  and  sensible; 
pointed  out  that  it  wouldn't  do  for  him  to  go  out  of  tewn 
with  his  grandfather's  life  hanging  by  a  hair,  as  it  was.  The 
old  gentleman  was  fond  of  him  and  in  the  event  of  a  return 
of  consciousness,  which  the  doctors  agreed  was  probable — 
possible  anyhow — would  certainly  want  to  see  him.  And  for 
Hugh  to  leave  the  house  without  leaving  town,  would  in  the 
present  circumstances,  be  sure  to  create  scandal.  Besides,  and 
lastly,  Hugh  wasn't  well  yet.  His  hand  was  still  in  bandages 
— a  conspicuous  sort  of  injury.  Why,  he  couldn't  eat  in  a 
restaurant  without  summoning  a  waiter  to  cut  up  his  food  for 
him.  And  he  was  to  forget  his  nonsense  and  be  reasonable. 
She'd  do  what  she  could  to  see  that  the  others  were. 

Sensible  as  her  reasoning  was,  I  think  it  unfortunate  that 
she  prevailed  over  him.  The  family  atmosphere  of  disap 
proval  was  poison  to  Hugh,  and  at  home  there  was  nothing 
else  for  him  to  breathe.  If  he  could  have  got  out  of  it  al 
together,  as  he  wanted  to  do ;  if  the  injury  to  his  hand  had  not 
precluded  his  seeking  out  and  getting  a  job  as  metallurgist, 
if — oh,  any  one  of  a  dozen  ifs,  easily  conceivable  but  not  worth 
enumerating,  might  have  turned  the  balance. 

Because,  as  regarded  Helena,  Hugh  did  not  really  know  his 
own  mind.  He  had,  for  years,  been  vaguely  expecting  that 
some  time  or  other  the  transfiguring  experience  of  falling  in 
love  would  happen  to  him.  Exactly  what  it  would  be  like 
he  had  never  taken  the  trouble  to  speculate.  You  knew  the 
real  thing  when  it  struck  you,  at  any  rate ;  that  seemed  to  be 
the  almost  universal  experience.  He  knew  that  it  excited  and 


142  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

gratified  physical  desires,  and  gave  them  a  moral  justification 
which,  outside  its  sphere,  they  lacked ;  transmuted  their  base 
metal,  somehow,  into  fine  gold.  But  all  that  was  secondary 
to  a  mysterious  primary  other  thing,  a  joyous,  confident  meet 
ing  of  souls,  the  thrill  of  a  million  tiny  points  of  contact  all 
around  their  two  perimeters. 

If  Hugh  had  felt  like  that  about  Helena — recognizably  any 
thing  at  all  like  that — the  disapprobation  of  the  family  would 
have  given  him  very  little  concern.  He  knew  their  bark  was 
worse  than  their  bite.  He  had  complete  confidence  in  the 
fundamental  good  sense  of  all  of  them,  as  well  as  in  the  per 
manency  of  their  affection  for  him.  If  what  he  did  proved, 
in  the  event,  to  have  been  well  and  wisely  done,  they  would 
eventually  see  the  wisdom  of  it  and  be  glad.  The  only  thing 
they  would  not  forgive  him  for  would  be  spoiling  his  life  by 
an  act  of  wilful  folly. 

Can  a  man  be  truly  in  love  when  he  is  capable  of  question 
ing  the  wisdom  of  it  ?  Hugh  was  constantly  barking  his  shins 
over  that  question  during  those  days. 

The  girl  had  taken  possession  of  his  thoughts  as  no  other 
person  or  interest,  however  absorbing,  had  ever  had  possession 
of  them  before.  He  did  not  dream  about  her  while  he  slept, 
nor  while  he  was  in  her  presence.  But  all  the  rest  of  the 
time,  it  is  fair  to  say,  he  did.  For  what  he  supposed  to  be 
his  thoughts  about  her  had  the  enormous  quality  of  dreams — 
like  drawings  without  scale  or  perspective.  He  had  endless 
imaginary  conversations  with  her  which  did  not  in  the  least 
resemble  anything  they  ever  said  when  they  talked  together. 
The  minutiae  of  her  life  took  on  grave  importance.  It  was 
intolerable  to  him  not  to  know  hour  by  hour  where  she  was — > 
what  she  was  doing.  A  day  that  passed  without  any  form  of 
communication  with  her  seemed  endless. 

And  yet,  he  could  not  disguise  the  fact  that  the  compara 
tively  few  hours  he  was  able  to  spend  in  her  society  were 
troubled — unhappy.  She  was  an  enigma  to  him  that  he  made 
no  progress  toward  solving.  He  experienced,  in  talk  with  her, 
sudden  revulsions,  incredulities,  as  disconcerting  as  air  pockets 
are  to  an  aviator;  they  gave  him,  literally,  the  sensation  of 


EIVEEDALE  143 

vertigo.  He  never  fell  quite  to  the  ground;  always,  before 
that  final,  fatal  smash,  she  swept  him  aloft  again. 

The  sheer  woman  of  her,  roused,  excited — half  intoxicated 
him.  The  texture  of  her  skin,  the  contours  of  her  -wonderful 
body,  the  color  and  warmth  of  her,  the  moments  of  arrested 
motion,  tense  and  almost  as  terrifying  as  those  of  a  panther, 
and  the  wonderful  relaxations,  luxurious — intolerable,  almost, 
— which  these  subsided  into — all  thrilled  and  tormented  him. 

It  horrified  him  to  find  himself  desiring  her,  as  there  was 
no  blinking  the  fact  he  did,  in  that  base  animal  fashion,  while 
what  he  had  always  believed  to  be  his  higher  emotions  were 
still  perplexed  and  contradictory.  The  *fact  that  he  was 
capable  sometimes  of  suspecting  that  she  deliberately  tempted 
him,  roused  him  to  a  passionate  denunciation  of  his  own  un- 
worthiness.  With  equal  wrath,  he  repudiated  the  notion  which 
sometimes  flamed  up  in  his  mind,  that  the  same  fiery  animal 
passion  which  burned  in  his  veins,  burnt  also  in  hers.  He 
had  alwa}rs  entertained,  quite  simply  and  without  speculation, 
the  conviction  that  no  nice  girl — no  decent  woman — ever  felt 
like  that.  Were  the  impulsive  caresses,  then,  that  she  half 
offered  him  and  hesitatingly  withdrew,  mere  symbols  of  af 
fection?  He  tried  hard  to  believe  that. 

He  would  walk  the  streets  for  hours  after  he  left  her,  liter 
ally  limp  with  exhaustion  and  in  a  state  of  mind  that  it  is  no 
exaggeration  to  call  torment.  Was  he  in  love  with  her  ?  Was 
the  beautiful,  confident,  perfect  thing  he  had  always  imagined 
the  phrase  to  mean,  a  mere  pink-and-white  confection  of  the 
romancer?  Was  it  merely  a  silly  caste  distinction  that  held 
him  back  ?  And  was  he,  in  his  soul,  a  snob  ?  Or  was  he  what 
Bob  would  think  him,  if  he  knew  the  facts,  a  plain  damned 
fool  for  making  all  this  fuss  instead  of  simply  going  ahead, 
seeing  how  much  he  could  get,  and  taking  it  ?  Was  Helena  in 
love  with  him  ?  Would  she  be  heart-broken,  or  simply  relieved 
of  an  expiation  his  crippled  hand  had  saddled  her  with,  if  he 
left  her  now,  as  she  so  often  urged  him  to  do?  What  did 
those  sullen,  bitter  moods  of  hers,  that  he  so  often  found  her 
in,  or  provoked  her  into,  mean  ? 

The  way  of  the  transgressor  is  hard,  no  doubt.    Bob  (I  feel 


114:  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

compunctions  about  overworking  this  essentially  decent  sort 
of  chap  as  a  horrible  example  in  this  connection ;  but  he  cornea 
naturally  to  hand)  had  had  his  bad  days,  and  even  weeks. 
He  had  sworn  many  a  fervent  "never  again  I"  But  the  sum 
of  all  Bob's  remorseful  sufferings  over  all  his  escapades,  from 
his  first  boyish  one  to  his  latest  man-of-the-world  affair,  would 
not  weigh  down  the  beam  against  what  Hugh  went  through  in 
that  one  month. 

It  is  to  be  noted  also,  though'  the  paradox  is  beyond  my 
powers  to  explain,  that  his  sense  of  rectitude  was  not  a  sup 
port  to  him.  Some  imp  within  him  used  it  merely  as  a  target 
for  shooting  arrows  of  contemptuous  interrogation  into.  Was 
there  something  queer  about  him  ?  Did  he  lack  something  of 
being  a  regular  normal  man? 

A  crisis  came  in  the  affair  at  last  one  afternoon  up  in  Alice 
Hayes'  sitting-room. 

Hugh  hated  that  room.  It  wasn't  big  enough  for  him. 
When  he  stood  up  in  it,  his  head  felt  the  oppression  of  the 
ceiling,  and  when  he  sat  down  in  it,  his  legs  stuck  out  too  far 
and  got  in  the  way  of  all  and  sundry  who  wanted  to  move 
about  in  it.  Night  and  day  it  was  badly  lighted,  and  he  was 
always  peering,  trying  to  see  more  than  he  could.  There  was 
a  cramped  little  fumed-oak  desk  in  the  corner  of  it,  where  he 
frequently  found  Helena  writing.  He  used  to  try  to  persuade 
her  to  go  out  into  the  near-by  park  with  him,  but  seldom  with 
success.  She  usually  pleaded  that  she  was  not  dressed  for  the 
street,  and  this  was  plausible. 

The  facts  were  that  she  had  no  good-looking  street  clothes. 
What  she  had,  extinguished  her — made  her  look  dowdy  and 
second-rate.  She  was  at  her  rapturous  loveliest  in  a  sugges 
tion  of  undress — a  kimono — any  old  rag  of  a  thing,  it  didn't 
matter — and  bedroom  slippers;  her  hair  a  wilderness.  Be 
sides,  she  hated  exercise  and  out-of-doors  generally. 

On  this  particular  afternoon,  Hugh  found  Alice  at  home, 
although,  as  usual,  on  the  point  of  departure.  She  was  a 
pleasant,  demure,  slim  little  thing  absurdly  young-looking 
when  one  considered  what  she  did  and  what  an  appalling  lot 
she  knew.  Hugh  liked  her ;  found  her  infinitely  easier  to  talk 


RIVERDALE  145 

to  than  Helena,  and  was  often  curiously  distraught  in  his 
mind  as  to  whether  lie  was  glad  when  he  found  her  there,  or 
sorry.  And  to-day,  though  he  fiercely  wanted  Helena  alone — 
he  knew  he  did ;  there  couldn't  be  any  doubt  about  that — yet 
he  found  himself  prolonging  Alice's  stay,  postponing  her  de 
parture,  with  a  sort  of  desperate  ingenuity. 

When  she  did  go  finally,  Helena  broke  the  stiff  silence  that 
followed  her  departure  by  asking  Hugh  why  he  had  not  gone 
with  her.  "She's  the  one  you  really  like/'  she  added  morosely. 
"She's  much  more  your  sort  than  I  am/5 

Hugh  snapped  at  her  for  that,  which  was,  a  moderately 
penetrating  observer  might  have  guessed,  exactly  what  she 
wanted  him  to  do.  And  for  five  minutes  they  quarreled. 
Hugh  hated  himself  for  this — for  the  things  he  found  himself 
saying.  He  didn't  want  to  say  them  or  think  them.  He  real 
ized  that  he  was  incapable  of  following  either  his  judgment 
or  his  inclination.  It  was  like  driving  a  car  in  a  deeply-rutted 
road.  You  slid  down,  somehow,  into  those  grooves  and 
couldn't  get  out. 

Then,  with  one  of  her  lightning  changes  of  mood,  she  re 
pented,  came  over  to  him  humbly  and  said  she  was  sorry; 
picked  up  his  wounded  hand,  noted  with  a  little  cry  of  joy 
the  lighter  bandages,  and  pressed  her  lips  down  softly  on  the 
newly-exposed  palm. 

He  buried  the  other  hand  in  her  hair.  He  was  trembling 
all  over.  All  the  power  of  resistance  he  had,  all  the  inhibitions 
of  chivalry  and  respect  for  womankind — all  that  he  classified 
broadly  under  the  term  decency,  was  barely  strong  enough  to 
hold  him  down  to  that  merely  brotherly  caress. 

The  crisis  passed.  She  took  her  lips  away  and  his  right 
hand,  that  had  been  in  her  hair,  fell  at  his  side  again.  She 
made  a  gesture  of  impatience  and  seated  herself  on  the  divan. 

"I'm  not  fit  for  human  society  to-day,"  she  said,  and  told 
him  why.  She'd  just  finished  a  short  story.  She'd  been  writ 
ing  ever  since  he  left  her  yesterday ;  all  night,  or  most  of  the 
night,  and  to-day,  until  a  half-hour  before  he  came. 

"A  story?"  he  said.    "That's  new,  isn't  it?" 

But  it  seemed  she  had  tried  it  before.    It  was  a  thing  she 


146  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

was  passionately  eager  to  do.  She  hated  the  drudgery  of 
translating  and  book-reviewing — all  the  stupefying,  stodgy 
things  that  the  necessity  of  getting  a  living  condemned  her  to. 
And  then,  none  of  the  foreign-language  papers  that  she  had 
access  to  paid  more  than  pittances.  Fiction  in  English,  if 
she  could  make  it  go,  would  he  a  way  out. 

Hugh  asked  if  he  might  hear  the  story,  and  she  read  it  to 
him. 

There  were  two  of  Hugh  who  listened.  'Way  down  inside, 
and  barely  audible,  was  the  incorruptible  critic,  who  writhed 
at  the  crudity — at  the  lack  of  temper — at  the  lumps  of  undi 
gested  syndicalist  propaganda — at  the  transparent  naivete  of 
the  fictional  devices  the  story  employed  to  make  itself  a  story. 
But  all  the  rest  of  him  was  a  furious  partisan  busy  shouting 
the  critic  down;  calling  the  crudities  strength,  the  lack  of 
temper,  passion,  and  trying  to  set  up  a  comparison  between 
its  harsh  formless  dissonances  and  those  of  the  newer  Russian 
music,  which  he  was  just  learning  to  admire.  Gradually, 
though,  he  stopped  listening  altogether;  just  looked,  as  her 
preoccupation  with  the  manuscript  enabled  him  to  do,  and 
drank  down  the  sound  of  her  voice. 

She  thanked  him  rather  wistfully,  when  the  reading  was 
finished,  for  the  kind  things  he  managed  to  say  about  the 
story,  and  this  note — one  he  had  never  heard  before  in  her 
voice,  nor  seen  in  her  dark  eyes — set  him  harder  at  the  task  of 
convincing  her  that  she  had  done  well.  In  his  own  ears,  the 
things  he  said  sounded  false  and  flat.  But  she  seemed  rather 
pathetically  pleased  with  them. 

"However,"  she  said  thoughtfully,  "it  won't  do  any  good. 
ISTo  editor  of  a  popular  magazine  will  think  about  it  like  that. 
I  don't  suppose  they  even  read  things  that  come  in  from  people 
they  have  never  heard  of." 

Hugh,  as  it  happened,  shared  this  wide-spread  delusion  with 
her.  "I  know  a  chap  that  writes,"  he  said  after  a  moment  of 
cogitation — "not  fiction;  special  articles,  but  he  knows  all  the 
editors  and  stands  well  with  them.  Barry  Lake,  his  name  is. 
He's  a  great  friend  of  Rodney  Aldrich's.  Give  me  the  manu 
script  and  Fll  get  him  to  read  it.  If  he  likes  it,  he  can  pass 


BIVERDALE  147 

it  on  to  somebody — tell  us  whom  to  send  it  to,  anyhow,  and 
write  a  letter  so  that  he'll  read  it." 

He  had  to  say  this  rather  more  resolutely  than  he  wanted  to, 
because  the  words  were  uttered  over  the  protest  of  the  critic 
in  him,  who  by  now  was  fairly  clamorous,  assuring  him  that 
Barry  Lake  wouldn't  like  it  a  bit  better  than  he  did ;  and  that 
he  would  look  an  ass,  going  to  a  man  he  knew  no  better  than 
Lake  on  such  an  errand. 

But  the  moment  he  had  said  the  words,  the  critic  was  for 
gotten.  Because  Helena  began  quietly  to  cry.  The  tears  just 
welled  up  into  her  eyes  until  presently  they  spilled  over  and 
her  efforts  to  check  them  seemed  only  to  make  them  come  the 
faster.  In  all  the  wide  range  of  emotional  states  Hugh  had 
seen  her  in,  she  had  never  been  near  tears.  She  seemed  no  less 
amazed  over  them  now  than  Hugh  himself. 

"I  don't  know  w-why  I'm  crying,"  she  said  desperately, 
when  the  fact  was  beyond  concealing.  "It's  too  silly." 

"It's  the  writing  all  night,  I  suppose,"  said  Hugh,  in  a  voice 
as  ragged  as  hers.  She  had  thrown  herself  down  on  the  divan, 
her  face  in  the  cushions.  He  seated  himself  gingerly  on  the 
extreme  edge  of  it  and,  with  an  awkward  hand,  touched  her 
shoulder — her  hair,  and  finally  took  one  of  her  hands  in  his 
good  one.  She  abandoned  it  to  him,  passively,  but  she  seemed 
to  find  some  comfort  in  the  contact.  Her  sobs  quieted  and 
presently  ceased  and  at  last  she  looked  up  at  him. 

"You  haven't  any  room,"  she  said.  "You're  sitting  on  noth 
ing,"  and  moved  so  that  he'd  be  more  comfortable. 

"It  wasn't  the  writing,"  she  began  at  last.  "It's  easy  for 
me  to  write,  and  it  never  hurts  me  to  go  without  sleep.  The 
thing  that  just  demoralized  me  was  your — kindness.  It's  new 
to  me,  and,  somehow,  it  hurts.  I  didn't  believe  in  it  at  first. 
I've  spent  hours  trying  to  figure  out  what  things  meant.  And 
then  I  came  to  see  at  last  that  they  didn't  mean  anything, 
except  just — that  you  were  kind.  And  this  last  thing  got  me, 
somehow." 

Hugh  wanted  to  know  what  she  meant  by  "this  last  thing." 
His  offer  to  show  her  story  to  Barry  Lake?  There  was  noth 
ing  much  to  that,  that  he  could  see. 


148  AN    AMERICAN   FAMILY 

"There  was,"  she  contradicted.  "You  hated  the  story  and 
you  hated  the  thought  of  showing  it  to  your  friend.  You  felt 
it  would  make  you  look  foolish  in  his  eyes.  But  you  were  go 
ing  to  go  ahead  and  do  it  just  the  same." 

The  clairvoyant  truth  of  this  analysis  of  his  feelings  was  too 
much  for  Hugh  to  deny  convincingly.  He  tried,  but  quickly 
shifted  the  issue. 

"Anyhow,  there's  nothing  extraordinary  about  it.  Most 
people  are  kindly  disposed,  I've  found." 

"I  haven't,"  she  said. 

And  when  he  exclaimed  incredulously  at  that  she  went  ve 
hemently  on. 

"It's  true.  I've  never  found  kindness.  People  have  been 
in  love  with  me,"  she  said,  " — men  and  women.  And  they 
have  made  sacrifices  for  me.  Grace  Drummond  did.  But 
she  wanted  them  paid  back.  She  kept  an  account,  put  her 
grievances  away,  just  the  way  she  put  her  savings  in  the  bank, 
to  draw  interest.  And  it's  been  the  same  with  all  the  rest. 

"But  you — you  don't  keep  any  account  at  all.  I  have  never 
made  you  anything  but  trouble  from  the  first  when  I  began  by 
hurting  your  hand,  and  you" — she  smiled  as  she  said  this, 
and  the  tears  flushed  up  into  her  eyes  again — "you  gave  me 
a  nice  clean  handkerchief  to  wipe  the  blood  away  with.  It's 
been  like  that  ever  since.  You  haven't  let  me  pay  anything 
back.  You  haven't — wanted  anything." 

"That,"  he  said  hoarsely,  "—that's  not  true."  .. 

She  turned  a  sudden  plunging  look  into  his  eyes,  and  raised 
her  head  slowly  from  the  pillow  so  that  her  face  came  nearer 
his. 

There  was  a  breathless  little  silence.  Then,  witHout  any 
voice  at  all,  he  said,  "Helena !"  and  she  understood  that  it  had 
come  at  last. 

She  drew  in  a  long  rapturous  sigK,  as  her  white  arm  slipped 
around  his  neck.  Her  head  dropped  back  on  the  pillow,  and 
his  followed  it. 


CHAPTER  XI 

CONSTANCE  CRAWFORD  was  having  dinner  alone 
with  her  father  that  night  at  the  Corbett  house.  It  was 
the  week  of  the  Republican  convention — the  famous 
steam-roller  convention  which  renominated  Taft — and  most  of 
the  family  were  down  at  the  Coliseum.  The  flickering  ex 
istence  of  the  not  quite  dead  old  man  up-stairs  had  materially 
subdued  their  interest  in  politics,  but  not  suppressed  it  alto 
gether.  They  were  divided  as  usual :  Gregory,  Bob,  and  Carter 
(about  to  enjoy  his  first  vote)  were  all  determined  adher 
ents  of  "Yale's  greatest  son."  Their  mother  was  a  fire- 
breathing  Rooseveltian.  She  was  engaged,  at  the  moment 
when  Constance  and  her  father  sat  down  to  dinner,  in  shouting 
"Robber!"  at  Mr.  Elihu  Root,  magnificently  oblivious  of  the 
consternation  she  was  causing  the  other  occupants  of  the  Re 
publican  committeeman's  box,  in  which  she  had  rashly  been 
invited  to  sit. 

Her  husband  was  not  attending  the  convention,  being 
equally  disgusted  with  the  tactics  of  both  wings  of  the  party. 
He  was  opposed  to  toryism.  No  man  was  more  progressive, 
in  the  true  sense  of  the  word,  than  he.  But  he  did  not  coun 
tenance  Mr.  Roosevelt's  methods — did  not  see,  in  fact,  how  a 
gentleman  could. 

Constance  herself  had  spent  the  afternoon  at  the  conven 
tion  with  her  husband  and  Jean,  but  had  had  enough  of  it 
by  dinner-time  and  gone  home  to  keep  her  father  company. 
Also,  she  hoped  for  a  visit  with  Hugh. 

She  was  fonder  of  Hugh  than  of  any  of  her  other  brothers, 
and  had  never  lost  the  maternal  attitude  which  four  years' 
seniority  had  given  her  in  their  childhood.  And  being  one 
of  those  open-eyed  young  women,  whom  marriage  does  not 

149 


150  AN   AMEKICAN   FAMILY 

stupefy  (  and  to  those  whom  it  does  not  affect  in  this  way,  it 
is  the  beginning  of  wisdom),  she  had  more  of  an  inkling  into 
her  brother's  perplexities  than  any  of  the  rest  of  them  except 
his  mother. 

It  was  Constance's  belief  that  he  was  being  shockingly  mis 
managed  at  home.  She  was  quite  at  one  with  them  in  wishing 
Hugh  well  quit  of  the  girl.  The  notion  that  he  might  marry 
her  was  simply  appalling  and  hardly  less  so  (more  so,  of 
course,  she  tried  as  a  respectable  upholder  of  morality  to  be 
lieve)  was  the  thought  that  he  might  already  have  struck  up 
an  illicit  relation  with  her.  But  the  surest  way,  she  felt,  of 
hounding  him  into  one  or  the  other  of  these  quagmires,  was 
by  adopting  the  precise  course  to  which  the  family  as  a  whole 
had  committed  itself.  A  little  decent,  friendly  sympathy,  she 
felt,  might  pull  him  through. 

She  flushed  with  hot  impatience  over  the  tone  with  which 
her  father  answered  the  butler's  inquiry  whether  Mr.  Hugh 
was  dining  at  home  to-night.  Mr.  Corbett  was  glacially  ig- 
norant  of  his  son's  whereabouts.  He  might  come  in  later,  but 
dinner  was  not  to  be  held  back  for  him.  So  Hugh's  vacant 
place  confronted  them  reproachfully  through  the  whole  meal. 

She  tried  once,  by  means  of  a  cautious  question  about  him, 
to  make  an  opening  for  speaking  her  mind — or  a  piece  of  it, 
anyhow — upon  the  subject,  but  her  father  put  a  lid  upon  the 
project  and  clamped  it  down.  Hugh's  present  conduct  was 
not  a  matter  which  he  was  willing  to  discuss  with  any  one, 
least  of  all,  with  his  daughter. 

But  he  was  incapable,  she  saw,  of  really  thinking  about  any 
thing  else.  They  made  talk  about  old  Gregory's  condition, 
vied  with  each  other  in  small  insincerities  to  the  effect  that  he 
was  really  getting  better,  chatted  a"bout  Constance's  children, 
the  phenomenal  growth  of  the  baby,  and  so  on,  and  at  last 
her  father  launched  a  half-hearted  explication  of  his  political 
views. 

At  nine  o'clock  Constance  pleaded  the  immediate  necessity 
of  beginning  her  long  drive  out  to  Lake  Forest  and  said  good 
night  to  him.  "I  want  to  see  Hannah  before  I  go,"  she  added 
as  she  left  him. 


EIVERDALE  151 

She  found  the  old  woman  up  in  the  housekeeper's  room,  and 
asked,  without  pretext,  for  information  about  Hugh. 

Old  Hannah  was  very  tight-lipped  and  tried  to  convey,  with 
out  asserting  the  fact,  the  impression  that  she  knew  nothing 
whatever  about  him.  Under  pressure,  however,  she  admitted 
that  he  had  come  in  half  an  hour  before  and  gone  to  his  room, 
having  declined  dinner  or  even  a  tray. 

"I  wouldn't  have  told  you  that,  if  it  wa'n't  that  he  looked 
sick.  But  don't  you  go  bothering  him,"  she  admonished  Con 
stance.  "I  reckon  he's  had  enough  of  that  lately  to  last  him 
quite  a  spell." 

She  did  not  knock  at  his  door ;  merely  said,  "It's  Constance. 
May  I  come  in?"  as  she  was  in  the  act  of  opening  it.  She 
heard  some  sort  of  muffled  reply,  that  was  not  at  any  rate  a 
peremptory  order  to  get  out,  so  after  a  momentary  hesitation, 
she  stepped  inside  and  shut  the  door  behind  her.  Then,  since 
her  knees  went  wobbly  all  of  a  sudden,  she  leaned  back  against 
it  and  hung  on  to  the  door-knob  for  support. 

A  hand-bag  and  a  suit-case  stood  open  in  the  middle  of  his 
bed,  amid  a  litter  of  clothes  and  toilet  tilings,  and  Hugh,  with 
his  back  to  her,  collarless  and  in  his  shirt  was  clumsily  trying 
to  pack  them.  She  could  only  suppose,  of  course,  that  the 
fatal  blow  had  fallen.  He  was  making  his  preparations  to  run 
off  with  that  girl. 

"Going  away  ?"  she  managed  to  ask,  and  he  answered  curtly, 
but  still  in  that  oddly  muffled  tone,  "Yes." 

That  was  all  between  them  for  quite  a  little  while.  She 
cast  about  desperately  for  something  reasonable  to  say,  but 
could  not  find  a  word.  Presently,  though,  he  turned  around — 
there  was  something  on  the  table  between  them  that  he  wanted 
in  his  packing — and  she  saw  his  face.  At  the  sight  of  it,  she 
fairly  cried  out.  It  was  pale,  haggard — absolutely  the  face 
of  a  man  in  torment. 

He  said  savagely  in  answer  to  her  cry,  "Shut  up!"  But 
this  was  a  mere  reflex  thrown  back  by  his  overstrung  nerves. 
Then  he  laboriously  pulled  himself  together.  "Sorry,  Connie," 
he  said,  "only  I  can't  stand  a  fire-alarm  to-night.  If  you  will 
just  go  away  and  let  me  alone  .  .  " 


152  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

Her  eyes  filled  up  and  she  said  over  a  break  in  her  voice, 
"Oh,  you  poor  dear  boy  I" 

At  that  he  turned  away  and  dropped  into  a  chair.  And  she, 
coming  around  behind  him,  bent  down  over  his  head  and 
pressed  her  hands  against  his  face. 

"If  it  was  making  you  happy,"  she  said  after  a  while,  "I 
wouldn't  care.  But,  Hugh,  dear,  if  it  makes  you  feel  like  this 
.  .  .  Is  it  too  late  now  to  stop  ?  Do  you  have  to  go  away 
with  her  ?  Oh,  not  to-night,  anyway  I" 

"I'm  not  going  away  with  her,"  he  said.  "I  don't  know 
where  I'm  going.  I'm  just  going  to  get  out  of — this." 

Constance  was  fortunate  in  having  escaped  the  family  irri 
tability.  There  were  few  jerks  or  starts  about  the  things  she 
did.  The  chief  of  her  charms,  indeed,  was  a  lovely  legato  of 
thought  and  movement.  She  was  not  a  wit  nor  a  beauty — 
she  was  a  fine,  wholesome,  good-looking  young  woman,  inclined 
to  freckle — but  her  social  success  was  indisputable.  It  was 
recognized  that  she  had  accomplished  an  extraordinary  feat  in 
having  managed  to  live  on  terms  of  unbroken  amity  with  her 
mother-in-law;  for  old  Mrs.  Crawford,  who  had  been  in  her 
day  both  a  beauty  and  a  wit,  was,  to  put  it  bluntly,  a  tartar, 
and  when  Constance  had  married  her  only  remaining  son, 
there  had  been  a  lively  expectation  of  squalls.  But  the  simple 
fact  was  you  couldn't  quarrel  with  Constance. 

That  beautiful  poise  of  hers  stood  her  in  good  stead  now  as, 
bending  over  her  tormented  brother,  she  learned  the  unhoped 
for  and  electrifying  fact  that  something  serious,  perhaps  con 
clusive,  had  happened  to  his  affair  with  "that  girl."  In  his 
state  of  acute  hyperesthesia,  the  faintest  manifestation  of  sur 
prise,  let  alone  exultation,  would  have  taken  him  like  a  blow. 
But  the  soothing  movement  of  his  sister's  hands  over  his  face 
remained  just  what  it  had  been  before  he  spoke. 

After  a  little  while,  unhurriedly,  she  left  him  and  went  over 
to  the  bed. 

"I'll  finish  packing  for  you,"  she  said.  "It  must  be  hard  to 
do  with  only  one  good  hand." 

She  felt  all  the  time  like  a  burglar  breaking  into  a  house. 
She  had  a  plan — no  less  than  to  steal  her  brother  away  and 


BIVERDALE  153 

carry  him  home  with  her.  But  she  knew  that  if  she  alarmed 
him  by  a  single  false  move,  stumbled  over  any  of  his  inflamed 
sensibilities,  the  plan  would  come  to  naught. 

"Prank's  going  away,  too,"  she  said  presently,  in  the  absent- 
minded  meaningless  way  possible  only  to  persons  who  are  busy 
with  something  else  at  the  same  time.  "It  breaks  his  heart 
to  leave  the  convention.  He's  down  there  now.  But  the  Lu- 
sitania  gets  in  on  Friday  with  Mother  Crawford  on  it — she's 
been  visiting  Christine,  you  know — and  he  has  to  be  there. 
He'll  have  to  go  up  with  her  to  Bat  Harbor,  too,  I  suppose. 
And  the  two  boys  are  out  at  the  farm  with  Mademoiselle,  so 
that  leaves  me  only  the  baby,  and  Jean." 

She  finished  packing,  he  putting  on  a  soft  collar  and  a  coat 
meanwhile,  without  another  word.  Then,  "I  guess  that's 
everything  you'll  want — for  a  week  or  so,"  she  told  him. 

"Much  obliged,  Connie,"  he  said,  and  from  his  tone  she 
guessed  he  was  thanking  her  for  what  she  had  not  done  rather 
than  for  what  she  had.  She  was  safe  so  far.  But  did  she 
dare  risk  the  sudden  irrelevance  of  the  invitation  she  wanted 
to  give  him? 

"I  must  be  going  on,"  she  said.  "I'm  driving  out  home  to 
night/' 

"I  wish  you  lived  here,"  he  told  her,  and  thus  gave  her 
the  cue  she  had  been  praying  for. 

"Come  and  live  with  me  for  a  while.  That'll  be  much 
easier  than  going  anywhere  else.  And  we  won't  bother  you, 
Jean  and  I." 

.There  was  a  long  silence.    Constance  held  her  breath. 

"She  hasn't  caught  any  more  burglars,  I  suppose,"  he  said 
at  last.  "She  must  be  quite  a  young  lady  by  now." 

"She  never  will  be,"  his  sister  answered  confidently.  "She's 
a  darling.  Wait  till  you  see  her." 

With  that  she  picked  up  the  lighter  of  his  two  bags  and 
started  to  the  door  with  it  deliberately  misreading  his  gesture 
of  protest.  "Oh,  I  can  manage  this  easily.  Come  along." 

He  took  up  the  other  bag  and  followed. 

Constance  fell  asleep  that  night  under  the  comforting  con- 
yiction  that  she  had  done  well.  It  might  be  premature  to  say 


154  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

that  Hugh  was  already  saved  from  the  clutches  of  his  beauti 
ful  anarchist,  but  at  all  events  the  tide  had  turned  that  way. 

They  had  talked  very  little  in  the  car  and  not  at  all  'to  the 
point.  She  could  only  guess  at  the  nature  of  the  thunderbolt 
which  had  fallen  on  him  that  afternoon ;  some  disillusioning, 
sickening  revelation,  most  likely,  of  Helena's  real  character 
and  her  designs  upon  him.  But  Constance  had  been  aware 
that  with  every  mile  of  the  ride  he  had  been  collecting  him 
self ;  that  the  terrible  tension  that  had  racked  him  was  re 
laxed,  and  that  her  own  presence  comforted  him.  By  the  time 
she  got  him  home  he  was  sufficiently  his  natural  self  to  pass 
her  husband's  inspection — the  only  thing  she  had  dreaded. 
But  Frank,  as  it  turned  out,  was  not  there. 

Jean  came  into  the  hall  when  she  heard  them.  She  flushed 
brightly  at  the  sight  of  Hugh,  and  there  was  no  mistaking  the 
pleasure  that  kindled  in  her  eyes.  But  she  was,  it  appeared, 
struck  speechless,  so  that  Constance,  with  a  laugh,  asked  what 
had  become  of  her  voice.  Then,  with  that  little  squaring  of 
the  shoulders  which  he  had  not  forgotten,  she  recovered  it. 

"I  had  meant  to  ask  Aunt  Constance,"  she  said,  "whether 
I  should  call  you  Uncle  Hugh.  But  I  didn't,  and  .  .  ." 

It  brought  a  lump  into  Constance's  throat  to  see  how  the 
haggard  look  left  his  face  at  the  sight  of  the  girl  and  the 
sound  of  her  fresh  young  voice.  Sweet,  clean,  unspoiled,  she 
did  not  even  suggest  by  contrast  that  other  one  who  had  been 
tormenting  him.  He  almost  laughed  when  he  said  that  if  she 
tried  to  call  him  uncle  he  would  tell  her  she'd  grown,  and 
forced  her,  by  a  direct  question,  into  calling  him  Hugh.  There 
was  a  sort  of  contented  gravity  about  her  smile  when  she  did 
it,  and  it  lingered  as  she  turned  to  her  aunt  and  explained  her 
genuine  uncle's  absence.  He  had  stayed  in  town  for  a  very 
exciting  political  conference  at  the  Congress  Hotel — it  might 
last  all  night,  he  said,  and  had  sent  her  home  in  the  care  of 
that  pretty  Mrs.  Williamson. 

Everything  was  coming  out,  Constance  felt,  exactly  right; 
even  Frank's  absence  helped.  With  him  there,  they  wouldn't 
have  raided  the  pantry  for  crackers  and  milk,  in  the  Arcadian 
way  they  did,  nor  parted  for  the  night  on  quite  the  same  note. 


EIVERDALE  155 

A  week  of  that  would  do  the  business,  she  believed.  She'd 
get  her  mother  on  the  phone  to-morrow  and  arrange  for  the 
establishment  of  an  absolute  quarantine;  no  mail  to  be  for 
warded,  no  messages,  nothing.  The  girl  probably  wouldn't 
let  him  go  any  easier  than  she  could  help,  but  ehe  simply 
shouldn't  be  allowed  to  get  at  him. 

It  was  a  good  plan,  founded  on  a  close  guess  at  the  nature 
of  Hugh's  trouble.  He  was  suffering,  when  she  found  him, 
from  a  spiritual  shock,  just  as  she  supposed.  But  in  guessing 
about  the  revelation  which  caused  the  shock  she  went  wrong. 

Hugh  would  have  supported,  I  believe,  the  sort  of  discovery 
Constance  had  in  mind  much  better  than  the  one  he  made. 
Had  Helena  said,  out  of  the  depths  of  shame  and  grief,  "I'm 
not  fit  to  marry  you.  I'm  not — good !"  If  she  had  forced  the 
fact  upon  him  with  a  detailed  confession ;  a  story  of  the  early 
violation  of  her  innocence — even  a  draggled  recital  of  subse 
quent  affairs — and  concluded  it  by  telling  him  that  she  knew 
what  true  love  meant  now  and  with  that  knowledge  realized 
that  she  was  not  worthy  of  it — if  she  had  told  him  that,  she 
would  have  dealt  him  a  blow,  indeed,  but  one  that  his  spiritual 
forces  were,  unconsciously,  braced  to  bear.  His  emotional  re 
actions  would  have  been  comprehensible  to  himself;  indigna 
tion — pity.  He  had  already  dug  the  channel  for  that  flood, 
though  he  did  not  know  it. 

But  what  Helena  had  said — boasted,  indeed — had  been  the 
contrary  thing.  And  in  her  fiercely  exultant  whisper,  "You're 
the  first !"  he  had  experienced  a  stab  of  inexplicable  horror. 
In  the  light  of  it  he  read,  as  in  a  lightning  flash,  her  intention 
of  giving  herself  to  him,  utterly,  then  and  there.  He  saw  the 
sudden  liberation  of  the  beast,  which,  since  adolescence  it  had 
been  his  pride  to  conquer  and  control ;  the  defacement,  under 
the  imputation  of  mere  cowardly  caution — of  all  his  ideals 
regarding  women,  chivalrous  respect,  delicacy. 

The  action  that  all  this  translated  itself  into,  had  been  a 
violent  wrenching  away  from  her  embrace,  that  left  them 
staring  at  each  other :  he,  bewildered,  crimson,  utterly  inartic 
ulate;  she,  darkly  incredulous,  with  anger  smoldering  in  her 
eyes.  To  his  miserable  attempts  to  explain  the  thing  that  had 


156  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

happened  to  him,  she  got  no  clue  at  all,  until  his  stammering 
out  of  something  about  "marriage"  enlightened  her. 

At  that,  however,  the  smoldering  spark  in  her  eyes  leaped 
into  a  flame. 

"Marriage!"  she  cried.  "Did  you  think  I  was  going  to 
marry  you  ? — Would  marry  anybody  ?"  It  was  the  beginning 
of  a  torrent. 

Hugh  had  never  seen  any  human  being  in  an  unbridled 
transport  of  anger  before.  It  was  simply,  of  course,  her  frus 
trated  passion  for  him  finding  another  vent  for  itself.  Her 
words  were  molten  incandescent  metal  that  clung  and  seared 
wherever  they  struck.  The  burden  of  them  was  the  contempt 
ible,  cowardly  hypocrisy  and  the  equally  cowardly  tyranny  of 
marriage.  True  love  was  degraded  by  all  association  with  it. 
It  was  an  infamous  slavery,  which  a  base  greed  for  possessions 
had  imposed  upon  the  world.  And  this  was  what  Hugh  had 
dared  suggest  to  her  I 

She  fascinated  while  she  horrified  him.  He  was  not  able 
to  terminate  the  scene  by  the  simple  expedient  of  going  away 
and  leaving  her.  He  had  no  volitional  activities  left.  But  at 
last,  her  fury  having  exhausted  itself,  she  curtly  ordered  him 
to  go.  And  he,  blankly,  and  without  a  word,  obeyed. 

How  much  later  it  was  when  he  encountered  old  Hannah  in 
the  up-stairs  corridor  in  his  father's  house,  or  where  he  had 
been  in  the  meantime,  he  did  not  know.  His  soul,  during  that 
time,  had  been  on  the  rack. 

Any  form  of  mental  anguish  escapes,  I  believe,  the  ultimate 
intolerable  turn  of  the  screw,  if  only  the  emotion  be  appro 
priate  to  the  circumstances  which  have  produced  it.  No  mat 
ter  how  terrible  may  be  the  lacerations  of  grief  one  suffers 
from  the  loss,  for  example,  of  wife  or  child,  there  is  a  measure 
of  comfort  and  support  in  the  sense  that  his  grief  is  something 
he  is  recognizably  entitled  to — something  that  will  instantly  be 
understood  by  all  acquainted  with  the  fact  upon  which  it  is 
based.  Even  the  criminal,  I  believe,  out  of  the  depths  of  re 
morse,  derives  a  certain  support  from  the  sense  that  remorse  is 
what  he  ought  to  feel. 


EIVERDALE  157 

Hugh,  under  however  staggering  a  revelation  of  the  un- 
worthiness  of  the  woman  he  loved,  would  have  felt  that  sup 
port.  The  shock  of  discovering  to  be  vile  -what  he  had  be 
lieved,  without  misgiving,  to  be  pure  and  beautiful,  would, 
of  course,  have  bewildered  and  stunned  him.  But  his  grief 
would  at  least  have  been  the  normal  thing — explicable,  any 
how,  to  himself,  and.  probably,  to  a  good  friend  like  Constance. 
And  even  if,  on  that  horrible  afternoon,  his  part  and  Helena's 
had  been  reversed ;  if  he,  carried  by  passion  beyond  all  decent 
bounds,  had  met  an  outraged  fury  of  resistance,  his  guilty 
shame  would  have  been  the  normal  thing  to  feel. 

He  was  shamed  now.  But,  inexplicably,  by  his  own  de 
cency  and  self-restraint;  by  the  fact  that  he  had  not  acted 
according  to  the  conventional  masculine  ideal.  Something  in 
him,  older  than  his  conscience,  and  deeper  downA  had  been  out 
raged  and  was  making  war  upon  him. 

There  is  no  such  thing  as  thinking  one's  way  out  of  a  sit 
uation  like  that.  It  is  immitigable.  Ring  down  the  curtain 
on  it,  if  you  can,  and  get  away — out  of  the  theater  altogether. 
Take  to  the  woods. 

I  can  not  imagine  anything  that  would  have  done  this  serv 
ice  for  Hugh  better  than  the  scheme  Constance  had  effected, 
of  taking  him  home  with  her  and  turning  him  loose  to  play 
with  young  Jean  Gilbert.  But  for  the  interposition,  once 
more,  of  what  you  may  call,  according  to  your  metaphysical 
preferences,  Providence  or  blind  chance,  I  think  it  would  have 
worked. 

Constance  shooed  them  away  next  morning  after  breakfast, 
and,  it  being  a  fine  bright  day,  with  just  a  nip  of  the  east  in 
the  air,  they  went  down  to  the  beach  and  presently  found  them 
selves  occupied  in  building  an  impregnable  medieval  castle  in 
the  sand,  with  moat,  barbican  and  keep,  all  complete — an  en 
terprise  which  made  it  easier  to  talk  by  removing  the  necessity 
for  thinking  up  things  to  talk  about. 

It  was  a  delicious  morning1  for  Hugh.  It  did  not,  of  course, 
obliterate  the  memory  of  yesterday  afternoon.  Sometimes  the 
very  intensity  of  the  contrast  it  presented  to  that  other  scene 


158  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

brought  the  other  back  with  the  terrible  stabbing  twinge  of 
a  wound,  so  that  he  turned  pale  and  the  sweat  beaded  out 
on  his  forehead. 

But  the  contrast  also  gave  it  something  of  the  monstrous 
unreality  of  a  nightmare  that  he  was  waking  from.  Both 
worlds  could  not  be  real;  Helena's  lurid  one  and  this  that 
Jean  had  taken  him  into.  Out  here,  in  the  frank  blaze  of 
sunshine,  his  eyes  resting  with  an  indescribable  sense  of  com 
fort  on  this  girl,  who  frankly  loved  it,  this  girl  so  sound,  so 
exquisitely  clean — this  girl  whose  transparent  child's  affection 
for  him  was  just  beginning  to  wear  the  reticent  grace  of  wom 
anhood,  the  nightmare  receded. 

He  found  a  deep  satisfaction  in  the  neat  simplicity  of  her 
dress,  in  the  tidiness  of  her  hair,  in  the  way  in  which — with 
out  stiffness  and  utterly  without  prudery — she  managed  not  to 
sprawl.  Such  facts  might  seem  superficial,  but  they  were  not. 
They  were  true  indicia  of  the  girl  herself.  There  was  nothing 
"nice"  about  her,  in  the  opprobrious  sense  of  the  word.  It  was 
true,  as  Constance  had  said,  that  she  would  never  be  a  young 
lady.  That  fine  resilient  rectitude  of  hers  was  no  more  the 
product  of  cautious  restraints — mean  little  prudential  fears — 
than  the  straightness  of  her  strong  young  back  was  the  product 
of  confining  whalebone  and  laces. 

He  had  seen  her  only  rarely  since  Anne's  wedding — two  or 
three  times  last  summer,  after  his  final  return  from  Youngs- 
town  and  before  she  went  away  to  school,  and  once  during  the 
Christmas  holidays.  Since  the  beginning  of  this  summer's 
vacation,  she  had  been  spending  a  month  with  her  father  and 
mother  down  at  San  Antonio,  and  had  only  just  returned. 
The  odd,  unclassifiable  relation  they  had  started  off  with 
during  Anne's  wedding  festivities,  had  remained  a  mild  sort 
of  family  joke.  Her  genuine  uncertainty  as  to  whether  she 
should  address  him  as  uncle,  or  call  him  by  his  first  name,  il 
lustrates  the  nature  of  it.  They  were  not  related  at  all  by 
blood,  and  yet  both  belonged  to  the  same  family ;  and  he  was 
just  as  much  younger  than  her  mother  as  he  was  older  than 
she.  So  there  was  no  conventional  label  to  attach  to  the  af 
fection  Hugh  felt  for  her,  and  no  need  for  trying  to  find  one. 


RIVERDALE  159 

The  family  jocularities  on  the  subject  would  have  annoyed  him 
only  if  he  had  seen  them  resulting  in  any  self-consciousness 
on  the  girl's  part. 

It  had  occurred  to  him  last  night,  remembering  the  bright 
blush  with  which  she  had  greeted  his  unexpected  appearance 
with  Constance,  to  wonder  whether  she  had  heard  any  talk 
about  his  affair  with  Helena.  It  wasn't  inconceivable  that 
Frank  might  have  blurted  out  something  in  her  presence. 
The  whole  lot  of  them  had  been  talking  about  it,  of  course. 

Down  on  the  beach  this  morning,  he  forgot  that  fear.  Work 
on  the  castle  became  desultory  and  finally  ceased  altogether 
as  the  girl's  talk  drifted  out  of  the  shallows  of  lazily  amus 
ing  description  of  her  school  life  into  deeper  channels.  She 
had  her  perplexities,  had  Jean — not  trivial,  either.  That 
month  she  had  been  spending  with  her  father  and  mother  had 
focused  them. 

"I  hated  to  come  away,"  she  said ;  "back  to  all  this.  Oh,  I 
love  Aunt  Constance — and  Uncle  Frank — "  This  addition 
was  a  dutiful  afterthought — "but  I  don't  think  I  love  grand 
mother — at  all.  She's  awfully  nice  to  me — that  is,  she's 
always  giving  me  things  and — and  showing  me  things  she 
says  I'm  to  have  when  she  dies;  but  she  makes  me  feel  as  if 
she  was  doing  it  to — buy  me  away  from  mother.  And  as  if 
I  was  letting  her.  It's  rather — horrid." 

Her  color  came  up  a  little  and  her  eyes  searched  his  face. 
"You  don't  mind  my  telling  you  about  it,  do  you?  You  see, 
there's  no  one  else  I  can  tell.  Because  if  father  and  mother 
knew  how  I  felt,  they  wouldn't  let  me  come  back.  But  I 
know  father  wants  me  to  see  it  through  because  he  thinks 
it  will  make  mother  happier  and  be  good  for  me,  and  mother 
wants  me  to  because  she  thinks  it  will  keep  him  from  worrying 
over  not  being  able  to  give  me  all  these" — she  stopped  to 
smile  good-humoredly  over  the  word — "advantages,  himself. 
And  then,  of  course,  it  would  seem  so  beastly  ungrateful  to 
Aunt  Constance. 

"It's  nice,  isn't  it,"  she  added,  "to  have  things  to  do  that 
there  isn't  any  doubt  about — clear,  straight  things  that  don't 
tangle  up?  It's  funny,  though.  This  has  got  clearer  just 


1GO  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

from  talking  to  you  about  it,  though  you  haven't  given  me  a 
word  of  advice.  You  couldn't,  of  course.  It's  one  of  the 
things  that's  up  to  me.  But  it's  been  sort  of — comforting, 
the  way  you  listened." 

A  fantastic  impulse  came  upon  Hugh — it  must  be  fantastic, 
of  course,  only  somehow  he  couldn't  make  it  feel  that  way — 
to  confide  his  trouble  to  her ;  the  whole  of  it — every  scrap  and 
rag  of  it.  He  felt  that  it  would  be  an  entirely  possible  thing 
to  do;  as  easy  as  with  any  one  else  in  the  world  it  would  be 
flagrantly  impossible.  She'd  have  no  advice  to  give  him,  of 
course.  But  just  as  she  would  sit  there  gravely  listening,  the 
horror  of  the  thing  would,  he  believed,  blow  away. 

It  was  a  crazy  notion,  of  course;  so  obviously  impossible 
as  to  require  no  active  effort  for  its  repression.  But  just  the 
momentary  entertainment  of  it  left  him  with  a  comforting 
little  glow  in  his  heart — a  glow  that  remained  after  they  had 
set  to  again  and  finished  their  castle  and  come  back  to  the 
house  for  lunch. 

They  had  made  their  plans  for  tennis  that  afternoon.  But 
it  was  just  as  they  were  leaving  the  lunch-table  that  the  tele 
phone  message  came. in  from  the  big  house  on  the  Drive  that 
old  Gregory  Corbett  was  dying  at  last.  Hugh  and  Constance 
must  come  home  at  once. 


CHAPTER  XII 

THE  old  gentleman  was  dead  before  they  reached  the 
house,  but  this  fact  had  no  importance,  since  he  had 
gone  out  without  the  momentary — anyhow — recovery  of 
his  faculties  which  they  had,  unconsciously,  been  looking  for. 

Logically  considered,  his  death  was  a  matter  of  infinitely 
small  significance.  At  one  moment  he  was  discernibly  alive, 
and  the  next  moment  he  was  not.  The  real  bereavement  of 
the  family  dated  back  to  his  fatal  seizure  weeks  before.  His 
place  in  the  world's  activities  had  already  closed  up  as  the 
face  of  the  waters  closes  upon  a  sunken  ship;  so  far,  that  is, 
as  human  relations  went.  And  yet,  BO  great  is  the  superstruc 
ture  of  financial  and  social  interests  and  dependencies  which 
a  very  rich  old  man  like  that  carries  on  his  back — a  super 
structure  which  remains  intact  so  long  as  the  merest  fading 
spark  of  life  persists  in  him — that  the  hardly  perceptible  fact 
of  its  extinction,  with  the  collapse  of  the  superstructure  which 
it  entails,  becomes  momentous. 

Life  in  the  great  house  had  gone  on,  for  weeks,  much  as 
usual  despite  old  Gregory's  disappearance  from  its  regime. 
The  others,  family  and  servants,  had,  in  unequal  degrees, 
missed  him,  grieved  for  him;  Hannah,  perhaps,  more  deeply 
than  any  of  the  rest  of  them,  but  not  far  behind  her  Mrs. 
Corbett. 

In  the  thirty-odd  years  since  her  marriage  to  Eobert,  she 
had  become  much  more  than  a  daughter-in-law  to  old  Greg 
ory.  The  daily  routine  of  those  years — especially  the  last  of 
them — had  woven  him  strongly  into  the  fabric  of  her  life. 
There  were  dozens  of  small  services  he  had  been  in  the  way 
of  relying  upon  her  for,  so  that  his  habits  and  his  wants  had 
been  a  larger  factor  in  the  organization  and  disposal  of  her 
days  than  her  husband's  had  been.  There  was  a  genuine  con 
geniality,  besides,  between  their  tastes  and  ways  and  notions. 

161 


163  A1ST   AMEEICAN    FAMILY 

The  abrupt  snatching  away  of  all  that  left  a  void  in  Her  that 
really  ached;  the  more  because  she  was  not  by  temper  a 
sentimental  woman. 

All  the  others,  of  course,  had  felt  twinges  of  that  same 
ache;  poignant,  trivial  realizations  of  one  aspect  or  another 
of  the  great  change,  yet  these  moments  had  not  altered  the 
tissue  of  their  lives  materially. 

But  with  the  last  expiration  of  breath  in  that  old  wrecked 
body,  up-stairs,  all  accustomed  activities  of  the  household 
stopped,  or  crept  about  apologetically;  and  mysterious  new 
activities  wore  an  air  of  solemn  importance.  Voices  were 
hushed,  footfalls  silenced;  the  air  turned  heavy,  dark,  flower- 
scented.  The  mail  swelled  to  unrecognizable  proportions,  and 
there  was  a  muffled  fusillade  of  telegrams.  And,  presently, 
outlying  contingents  of  the  family  began  arriving,  until,  big 
as  the  house  was,  its  capacities  were  taxed  for  their  enter 
tainment  as  they  had  not  been  since  Anne's  wedding. 

Anne  herself  was  one  of  the  first  of  these  arrivals,  attired 
in  the  precise  density  of  mourning  appropriate  to  the  occa 
sion  and,  also  in  the  appropriate  degree,  visibly  stricken  with 
grief.  Equally  decorous,  and  hardly  less  genuine,  was  the 
solemnity  of  a  flock  of  cousins — descendants  of  the  original 
plow-maker  who  had  quarreled  with  old  Gregory  half  a  cen 
tury  before. 

Anne  was  too  late  to  participate  in  the  family  council 
which  decided  about  the  funeral,  but  she  put  up  a  spirited 
protest  against  the  decision  she  found  adopted.  It  was  too 
tiresome  of  them  to  go  on  clinging  to  those  provincial,  middle- 
western  ways  just  because  grandfather  had  got  into  the  rut 
of  them  half  a  century  ago.  A  house  funeral,  with  the 
undertaker's  men  handing  little  folding  chairs  about  over 
people's  heads  and  a  quartette  up  on  the  stairs  singing  hymns ! 
What  if  grandfather  had  expressed  his  dislike  (with  great 
vigor  and  not  quite  quotably,  now  that  he  was  dead)  of  the 
flummery  of  church  funerals !  Other  people's  feelings,  Anne 
felt,  might  be  considered  a  little.  Who  knew  but  grandfather 
himself  might  be  feeling  differently  about  it — now !  It  hardly 
needs  saying  that  Anne's  plea,  for  all  the  sjupport  it  got,  un- 


EIYERDALE  163 

ostentatiously,  from  some  of  the  others,  effected  no  change  in 
the  plans.  The  denial  of  it,  however,  gave  her  grief  a  touch 
of  martyrdom  which  became  her  very  well. 

Constance,  the  first  chance  she  got  alone  with  her  mother, 
had  confided  to  her  what  she  knew,  and  added  what  she 
guessed,  about  the  fortunate  misfortune  v/hich  had  befallen 
Hugh's  love  affair.  Constance  had  gone  on  to  say  what  she 
thought  about  the  very  great  importance  of  treating  her 
brother  tenderly — of  the  avoidance  of  all  nagging  references. 

Mrs.  Corbett's  mind  approved  of  this  plan  well  enough, 
but  the  state  of  her  emotions  was  unruly.  She  was  not  in  a 
tender  mood  with  Hugh,  when  she  passed  Constance's  news  on 
to  her  husband  and  Gregory — through  whom  it  percolated  in 
the  course  of  a  few  hours  to  the  others — and  Hugh  found  him 
self  being  treated  like  a  providentially  returned  prodigal.  It 
is  hard  to  express  that  attitude  in  words,  without  burlesquing 
it,  but  the  sense  of  it  was  the  intense  appropriateness  of  Hugh's 
repentance  in  the  face  of  the  disaster  his  folly  had  wrought. 
It  was  well  that  he  had  learned  his  lesson,  even  though  too  late. 
The  effect  of  this  was  to  reduce  Hugh  to  a  state  of  frenzied 
exasperation. 

All  passions,  of  course,  are  egotistical.  The  quality  of  any 
strong  emotion  is  to  enhance  the  importance  of  the  possessor 
of  it.  One  watches  irritably  from  the  midst  of  some  interior 
crisis  of  his  own,  the  rest  of  the  world  going  on  about  its 
affairs.  Hugh,  in  the  crisis  of  what  was  incomparably  the 
most  violent  emotional  storm  that  ever  had  beset  him,  would 
have  found  the  smug,  ceremonial  grief  of  those  funeral  days 
difficult  at  best  to  take  his  decorous  part  in.  This  collective 
family  attitude  toward  himself  was  almost  intolerable. 

He  did  tolerate  it — saw  it  through — kept  his  face  and  his 
tongue,  but  at  the  sacrifice  of  all  feeling  of  solidarity  with 
the  rest  of  them.  He  brooded  as  he  watched  and  listened, 
like  an  exile.  The  man  that  had  once  been  himself  seemed 
almost  as  much  a  stranger  to  him  as  his  brothers  and  sisters. 
He  began  to  see,  or  believed  he  began  to  see,  how  he  himself 
had  looked  to  Helena.  Some  of  the  molten  phrases  she  had 
used  on  that  last  afternoon  about  the  smug  hypocrisies  of  re- 


164  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

spectability,  recurred  to  him  with  a  look  of  truth.  What  a 
lot  of — barnyard  fowls  they  all  must  look — including  him 
self,  ostracised  from  them  though  he  was  by  his  calamitous 
attempt  to  fly — in  the  eyes  of  that  wheeling  hawk  up  yonder. 

On  the  morning  of  the  funeral,  amid  the  heaps  of  condola 
tory  messages  which  the  mail  brought  in,  he  found  a  letter 
from  her.  He  carried  it  away  to  his  room  and  locked  himself 
in  before  he  opened  it. 

It  was  a  well-taken  precaution,  because  at  sight  of  the  very 
first  word  of  its  closely  written  pages,  he  literally  turned 
giddy  and  dropped  into  a  chair.  That  first  word  was  "Dear 
est."  It  had  been  his  unformulated  conviction,  you  see,  that 
she  despised  him;  that  he  must  have  been,  in  her  eyes,  since 
that  horrible  moment  when  he  had  torn  himself  from  her 
embrace,  a  fool— a  ludicrously  contemptible  fool. 

That  one  caressing  word  set  his  heart  beating  to  a  new 
rhythm.  It  was  a  matter  of  minutes  before  he  read  any  more. 

"I  shall  mail  this  in  the  station,"  she  wrote,  "just  before  I 
take  the  train — so  that  when  you  get  it,  I  shall  be  really  gone. 
It  is  the  only  thing  to  do.  I  have  always  known  that,  only 
for  a  little  while  I  have  tried  to  be  blind.  We  love  each  other 
— I  have  loved  you  since  that  first  night  of  all  when  I  hurt 
your  hand,  and  that  is  what  I  have  gone  on  doing  ever  since, 
loving  you  and  torturing  you.  Yesterday  must  be  the  last 
time.  I  must  go  away  now,  while  the  thought  of  how  you 
must  be  loathing  and  despising  me  gives  me  courage, 

"If  this  letter  is  in  your  hands,  it  means  that  my  courage 
has  not  failed ;  that  I  have  given  you  up  and  gone  away  out  of 
your  life  forever.  But  since  I  have  gone  and  the  most  beau 
tiful  thing  in  my  life  is  just  a  dream  to  remember,  I  am  let 
ting  myself  write  this  letter  that  will  try  to  make  you  under 
stand — BO  that  when  I  think  about  you  I  can  pretend,  at  least, 
to  hope  that  you  are  remembering  me  without  disgust  and 
loathing, 

"I  do  not  believe  that  a  person  of  your  cold  race  can  under 
stand  what  love  means  to  a  person  of  mine — of  my  mother's. 
Love  has  been  my  religion — the  only  religion  I  have  had. 


BIVEKDALE  165 

Like  the  old  prophet,  Elijah,  I  built  an  altar  and  laid  a  sacri 
fice  on  it  and  waited  for  the  fire  to  come  down  from  Heaven. 
I  would  have  nothing  to  do  with  the  prophets  of  Baal — you 
do  remember  the  story,  don't  you? — who  have  wanted  to 
kindle  that  fire  for  themselves.  There  have  been  more  of 
them  than  I  can  count.  No  man  has  ever  come  near  me  until 
you,  who  would  not  have  lighted  that  fire  if  he  could. 

"And  then  you  came — and  the  fire  from  Heaven — the  thing 
I  had  been  praying  for. 

"It  was  nothing  doubtful,  nothing  to  question  or  weigh  ad 
vantages  about.  I  was  fiercely  impatient  of  your  restraints. 
I  wanted  to  give  myself  -freely — not  to  drive  a  bargain.  And 
I  gloried  in  having  something  of  worth  to  give — in  having  for 
my  god  an  undesecrated  altar. 

"I  don't  suppose  the  girls  you  have  always  known  would 
boast  to  a  lover  of  a  thing  like  that.  Maybe  there  are  no 
prophets  of  Baal  about  their  altars — or  maybe  the  true  fire 
never  comes  down  from  Heaven.  I  don't  know. 

"It  was  hours  after  you  had  gone,  before  I  could  understand 
what  had  brought  that  look  into  your  face,  and  when  I  did,  I 
burnt  with  shame. 

"Before  that  I  was  blindly  angry.  I  know  truer  than  what 
I  said  to  you  in  my  wrath,  about  marriage.  The  things  you 
have  been  brought  up  from  childhood  to  believe,  run  away 
with  you  sometimes,  your  more  lately  acquired  wisdom  tug 
ging  helplessly  at  the  reins.  At  another  time  I  could  have 
talked  with  you  sanely  enough  about  it,  argued  the  difference 
out,  compromised  it  somehow.  But  the  introduction  of  it  at 
that  moment  .  .  . 

"I  can  not  write  about  it.  The  sKame  burns  me  again. 
Only — I  am  not  vile  and  what  I  meant  was  not.  I  thought 
I  could  explain  with  just  this  cold  white  sheet  of  paper  here 
before  me.  But  even  so,  I  find  I  can  not, 

"You  need  not  try  to  explain  to  me.  As  well  as  I  erer 
could,  I  understand  already.  It  is  that  quality  of  yours  which 
I  have  never  found  a  name  for,  though  I  have  tried  many. 
Kindness,  asceticism,  inhumanness  (is  there  such  a  word?) — • 
none  of  them  fits.  You  are  not  passionless — that  I  know — but 


166  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

something — the  very  force  of  the  passion  itself,  seems  to 
raise  a  barrier  of  steel  and  ice  to  confine  it.  Perhaps  chivalry, 
back  in  the  great  days  of  it,  was  like  that. 

"But  it  is  not  in  me — nor  anything  that  answers  to  it   .    .    . 

"Oh,  it  would  be  hopeless,  my  dear !  I  was  right  tHat  first 
afternoon  when  I  tried  to  send  you  away;  when  I  said  we 
should  only  destroy  each  other.  If  it  could  be  a  swift  destruc 
tion — glorious — I  could  embrace  it  and  'count  the  world  well 
lost.'  But  it  would  not  be  like  that.  As  a  lost  lover,  I  shall 
be  able  to  dream  about  you,  and  part  of  the  dream  will  be 
that  sometimes  you  dream  tenderly  of  me.  So  I  am  right  to 
go  away.  Do  not  try  to  find  me.  Oh,  my  dearest,  good-by ! 
I  adore  you.  HELENA.'' 

Upon  Hugh,  the  effect  of  this  letter  was  simply  tHat  of  a 
rising  tide  on  a  ship  which  has  grounded  itself  on  a  sand-bar. 
It  supported  him,  relieved  the  racking  strain  and  stress — 
leveled  him  up,  and  finally,  floated  him  free  and  made  his 
own  will  the  master  of  his  courses.  The  tormenting  paralysis 
of  indecision  which  had  hung  upon  him  for  the  past  month, 
was  gone.  He  knew  now  that  Helena  loved  him.  The  dark 
enigma  of  her  bitter  moods  was  solved.  And  what  an  ig 
norant,  uncomprehending  fool  he  had  been.  And  in  his 
ignorance,  how  hideously  had  he  misunderstood  her — not 
once ;  a  score  of  times.  That  last  scene  with  her  had  only  been 
the  logical  climax  of  a  dozen  others. 

She  had  been  right  in  saying  he  did  not  know  what  love 
was.  Now  he  was  beginning  to  understand  it.  It  was  one 
thing,  not  two.  Soul  and  body,  by  a  mysterious  chemistry, 
united  to  make  its  flame.  To  her,  frank,  fearless,  free,  lighted 
with  her  "fire  from  Heaven,"  what  a  contemptible  clod  he 
must  have  seemed. 

Only  she  was  not  contemptuous.  Love  had  inspired  Her 
with  a  divine  comprehension  which  made  even  forgiveness  un 
necessary.  She  had  understood  him,  somehow,  better  than 
he  had  understood  himself. 

An  hour  after  he  had  finished  reading  the  letter,  he  folded 
it  decisively  and  put  it  in  his  pocket;  stood  up,  stretched  his 


KIVERDALE  167, 

arms,  and  drew  in  a  long  steady  breath  in  the  luxury  of 
knowing  at  last  exactly  what  he  was  going  to  do. 

He  would  find  Helena — perhaps  Alice  Hayes  would  help 
him  there,  hut  if  she  would  not,  it  didn't  matter — he  would 
find  her  anyway.  When  lie  found  her,  he  would,  if  possible, 
marry  her.  His  inclination,  the  dictates  of  common  sense, 
consideration  for  his  family,  all  pointed  out  that  course  as 
preferable.  He  thought  she  would  probably  agree  to  that. 
Her  letter  had  as  good  as  said  so.  But  if  she  did  not — well, 
that  wouldn't  matter  either.  The  first  thing  to  do  was  to  talk 
with  Alice  Hayes. 

He  looked  at  his  watch.  It  was  only  eleven  o'clock  and 
the  service  was  not  till  two.  If  he  could  find  Alice,  there 
would  be  time  to  accomplish  something  now.  He  walked 
straight  down-town  to  the  office  of  the  newspaper  she  worked 
for,  at  a  gait  that  was  as  different  from  his  ploddings  about 
the  street  during  the  past  month  as  if  it  belonged  to  another 
man.  He  was  going  somewhere  now,  and  he  went  with  a 
swing.  His  appearance  in  the  local-room,  where  he  was 
recognized  by  one  or  two  of  the  early-bird  reporters  (here 
was  a  worm  for  them,  if  they  only  knew  it!),  roused  a  cer 
tain  amount  of  curiosity.  But  to  this  he  was  quite  oblivious. 

Alice  Hayes  had  not  come  in  yet,  but  in  the  act  of  going 
away,  he  found  her,  just  arrived,  at  the  mail  box. 

"Where  can  I  talk  with  you?"  he  asked.  "Five  minutes 
is  all  I  need." 

She  led  him  out  into  the  corridor. 

"Can  you  tell  me  where  Helena  has  gone  ?"  he  asked. 

She  shook  her  head. 

"Do  you  mind  telling  me,"  Hugh  went  swiftly  on,  "whether 
you  really  don't  know,  or  whether  you  are  under  instructions 
from  her  not  to  tell  me?  It  won't  make  any  difference  in 
what  I  am  going  to  do,  which  the  answer  is." 

"I  really  don't  know,"  Alice  said.  "Not  where  she  is  now. 
And  she  didn't  tell  me  a  word.  Just  packed  and  went.  That 
was  day  before  yesterday."  She  hesitated  and  looked  up  to 
Hugh's  thoughtful  face.  "I  do  happen  to  know  though," 
she  added,  "that  she  checked  her  trunk  to  New  York." 


168  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

His  face  lighted  instantly.  "All  right/*  he  said.  "That's 
enough  to  go  on.  It  was  awfully  good  of  you  to  tell  me." 
He  held  out  his  hand  for  hers.  "I'm  going  to  find  her  and 
make  her  marry  me.  Wish  me  luck  1" 

She  said  she  did,  in  a  tone  which  he,  in  his  preoccupation, 
saw  nothing  strange  ahout,  and  he  went  away  as  swiftly  as 
he  had  come ;  to  the  bank  first  to  draw  some  money,  and  then 
home  again — all  on  foot.  His  perplexities  were  over. 

But  he  had  left  Alice  in  a  perfect  quagmire  of  them — a 
story  on  her  hands — a  wonder  of  a  story ;  a  story  with  which 
she  could  beat  the  other  papers  in  the  city  by  twenty-four 
hours.  And  she  could  earn  eternal  gratitude — eternal  that 
is,  as  anything  on  a  newspaper — by  just  going  up  to  the  city 
editor's  desk  and  telling  him  the  tip  she'd  got.  The  story 
was  sure  to  break  sometime,  too,  with  a  really  tremendous 
bang. 

We  have  no  room,  though,  for  Alice's  perplexities.  It  must 
suffice  to  chronicle  the  fact  that  when  she  went  to  the  editorial 
desk  a  few  minutes  later,  she  merely  swallowed  hard  and  asked 
for  her  assignment. 

Hugh  went  straight  to  his  room,  packed  his  bag — the  same 
occupation  Constance  had  found  him  in  less  than  a  week 
before,  yet  in  its  spiritual  significance  antipodally  different — 
laid  out  traveling  clothes,  dressed  himself  in  decent  black  for 
the  service,  and  went  down-stairs  to  the  room  which  had  been 
reserved  for  the  immediate  family.  Most  of  them  were  gath 
ered  there  already  and  his  entrance,  quiet  and  matter-of-fact 
as  it  was,  stirred  a  sensation  of  uneasy  curiosity.  It  was  not 
that  he  was  different  from  the  son  or  brother  they  knew,  but 
that  having  been  different,  he  had  suddenly  and  almost  un 
believably  become  his  natural  self  again.  What  could  have 
happened,  since  breakfast,  to  work  a  transformation  like  that  ? 
Had  be  been  able,  somehow,  to  pitch  overboard,  altogether,  his 
obsession  about  that  girl?  It  seemed  the  only  explanation 
there  was.  And  yet  .  . 

His  mother's  eyes  hardly  left  his  face  during  the  service 
and  they  sought  it  whenever  his  look  was  turned  away  during 


BIVERDALE  169 

the  ride  out  to  Graceland  cemetery.  The  only  time  she  wept 
was  at  the  grave-side  when  she  heard  his  voice  come  out,  clear 
and  steady  through  the  murmur  of  the  others,  upon  the  Lord's 
prayer.  A  dozen  years  ago,  when  formal  religion  had  been 
a  much  more  real  element  in  her  life  than  it  was  now,  she  had 
entertained  a  day-dream,  hardly  genuine  enough  to  be  called 
a  hope,  of  his  becoming  a  preacher.  The  memory;  of  it  re 
curred  to  her  now  poignantly  and  at  the  words,  "And  lead  us 
not  into  temptation,  but  deliver  us  from  evil,"  a  great  sob 
shook  her  and  she  clung  to  his  arm.  The  figure  her  fancy 
saw,  down  there  in  the  grave,  was  not  the  old  man  who  had 
lived  his  life  out  to  so  satisfactory  an  end,  but  this  boy  of  hers 
that  all  her  dearest  hopes  had  centered  upon. 

Because  what  the  others  had  only  uneasily  and  vaguely 
guessed,  she  had  understood  to  the  full.  She  knew.  And 
when,  after  their  return  to  the  house  she  heard  him  ask  his 
father  for  a  few  minutes'  talk,  and  saw  them  go  away  together 
to  the  up-stairs  study,  she  went  up  to  her  own  room  and  waited 
there,  with  the  door  open. 

It  was  more  than  an  hour  later  when  she  heard  her  son's 
steps  coming  along  the  hall,  but  she  did  not  speak  until  they 
slackened  outside  her  door.  Then : 

"I'm  in  here,  Hugh,"  she  said. 

He  was  pale,  she  noted,  but  entirely  self-possessed,  and  he 
had  a  smile  for  her  that  brought  the  tears  again.  She  dashed 
them  bruskly  out  of  her  eyes. 

"I've  just  been  telling  father  that  I'm  going  away,"  he  said. 

"To  her."  She  did  not  inflect  the  words  like  a  question,  but 
he  answered  as  if  it  had  been  one. 

"To  Helena;  yes,"  he  said.  "I've  got  to  find  her  first,  but 
I'm  confident  I  can." 

"To  marry  her  ?"  This  was  a  question. 

"If  I  can  persuade  her  to.    It  will  amount  to  that,  anyhow." 

There  was  a  little  silence  before  she  spoke.  Then,  "I'm  not 
going  to  beg.  You've  been  through  everything  that  can  be 
said,  I  suppose.  It's  decided,  isn't  it?" 

"Yes,"  he  said. 


170  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

"Come  over  here  and  kiss  me,  then,  and  go." 
The  tears  welled  up  into  his  own  eyes  as  he  obeyed  her.    At 
the  end  of  the  embrace  she  said : 

"Come  back  again,  some  time,  Hugh." 
That  was  all. 


CHAPTEE  XIII 

THE  whole  summer  of  nineteen  twelve  was  a  troubled  one 
for  the  Corbett  family,  but  the  blackest  period  of  it  was 
the  fortnight  that  intervened  between  the  day  of  old 
Gregory's  funeral  and  the  day  when  Hugh's  mother  got  a 
letter  from  him  informing  her  of  his  marriage  to  Helena. 

It  was  at  the  end  of  this  fortnight  that  Frederica  Whitney, 
having  run  down  from  Lake  Geneva  for  a  day  or  two,  called 
up  Constance  on  the  telephone.  She  found  her  at  the  Corbett 
house  in  town,  after  having  tried  Lake  Forest  first,  and  asked 
if  she  could  come  to  see  her. 

"Let  me  come  to  you  wherever  you  are/'  Constance  said. 
"This  afternoon? — If  you're  alone,  that  is.  I  don't  want  to 
see  anybody." 

Frederica,  it  appeared,  was  at  the  Blackstone.  Her  own 
house  was  such  a  barn  when  there  was  no  one  in  it. 

"That's  nice,"  Constance  said.  "Then,  when  we  have  shut 
the  door  and  turned  off  the  telephone,  we  can  just  sit  down 
and  talk.  It's  been  ages  since  we've  had  a  chance." 

It  was  an  old,  comfortable,  mellow  sort  of  friendship,  this 
between  Constance  and  Frederica.  They  had  never  put  it  in 
jeopardy  by  subjecting  it  to  any  high  emotional  tension.  They 
were  too  much  alike — took  each  other  too  easily  for  granted, 
to  do  that.  Both  of  them  had  been  sensibly  brought  up ;  both 
had  married  well,  and  not  only  in  the  worldly  sense  of  the 
phrase.  Frederica  was  a  genuine  beauty,  and  a  moralist 
might  be  inclined,  therefore,  to  allow  her  somewhat  less  credit 
for  the  even  amiability  of  her  disposition,  than  he  would  give 
Constance,  who  had  attained  it  without  that  attribute.  It  was 
characteristic  of  Constance  that  since  very  early  girlhood  this 
sheer  physical  loveliness  of  Frederica's  was  a  thing  she  had 
enjoyed  without  a  tinge  of  envy. 

They  talked  for  a  while  on  the  occasion  of  this  meeting, 

171 


173  AN   AMEEICAN   FAMILY 

witH  only  Half  their  minds,  about  what  Frederica  Had  come  up 
to  town  for,  the  health  and  occupations  of  their  respective 
husbands  and  children,  the  growth  of  their  babies — Frederica 
had  one  a  few  months  older  than  Constance's — and,  presently, 
of  the  occasional  satisfaction  there  was  in  getting  away  from 
them  all,  of  finding  themselves  in  the  sitting-room  of  a  hotel 
suite  (It  was  a  pleasant  room,  so  high  up  that  there  was  noth 
ing  but  the  horizon  of  a  very  blue  lake  to  look  ai\  without 
even  one's  familiar  servants  about. 

"I  have  been  envying  you,  this  last  two  weeks,  not  having 
any  family,"  Constance  admitted  with  a  sigh  which  was  the 
beginning  of  genuine  confidences. 

Frederica  was  not  precisely  a  waif,  but  both  her  parents,  as 
well  as  her  husband's,  were  dead;  her  married  sister  Harriet 
lived  in  Italy,  and  her  brother  Eodney's  marriage,  which  had 
taken  place  only  a  few  weeks  before,  gave  her  a  sort  of  isola 
tion,  which  to  poor  Constance  looked  like  heavenly  peace. 

Frederica  nodded  sympathetically.  "You  poor  dear!"  she 
said.  "I  can  imagine.  Of  course  I  have  always  envied  you, 
having  such  a  lot,  so  that  one  more  or  less  wouldn't  matter  so 
much.  And  never  more  than  for  a  while  after  Rodney  had 
told  me  he  was  going  to  marry  Eose." 

"Oh,— Rose!"  said  Constance. 

"Of  course,"  Frederica  conceded,  "I  felt  all  right  about  that 
as  soon  as  I'd  fairly  seen  her.  Or  almost.  She  is  a  perfect 
dear !  And  I  think  it's  going  to  work.  But  when  he  told  me 
about  her — somebody  I'd  never  even  heard  of  ...  Well, 
you  know,  Connie,  the  decenter  a  man  is,  the  nicer  and 
straighter  and  cleaner,  like  Hugh  and  Eodney,  the  more  likely 
he  is  to  fall  in  love,  in  his  innocence,  with  just  anybody.  That 
doesn't  seem  fair,  but  it's  so.  And  Eod  was  the  only  brother 
I  had.  Of  course  it  was  a  relief  to  be  able  to  take  my  own 
line — not  to  have  Harriet  around,  for  instance.  And  I  sup 
pose  that's  what  you  haven't  been  able  to  do." 

"I  believe  I  could  have  rescued  him,"  Constance  said.  " — 
Jean  and  I  could  have — with  half  a  chance.  But  the  others 
absolutely  hounded  him  into  it." 

Frederica's  eyebrows  indicated  that  she  had  made  a  mental 


[RIVERDALE  173 

note  of  that  reference  to  Jean  for  future  examination.  For 
the  present  she  passed  it  by. 

"How  bad  is  it,  Connie?"  she  asked.  "All  I've  had  is  the 
gossip.  Has  he  married  her?" 

"He  went  off  to  find  her,"  Constance  said.  "And  if  he  can, 
he  will.  She  ran  away  and  left  a  note,  and  he  followed,  the 
day  of  the  funeral,  to  New  York.  He  seemed  to  know  that 
was  where  she  had  gone.  I  suppose  he  hasn't  yet,  or  it  would 
be  in  the  papers.  It  will  be,  of  course,  when  he  does.  That's 
what  we're  waiting  for. 

"It's  simply  been — well,  Carter  says,  'hell  with  bells  on/ 
at  home.  Mother  grim  and  Greg  solemn ;  Anne  simply  in  fits. 
She's  almost  funny,  she's  so — desperate.  I  wish  she'd  go 
home.  But  she  thinks  it's  her  duty  to  stay  around  and  rub  it 
in.  She  couldn't  be  half  so  ashamed  and  tragic  if  she'd  eloped 
herself — with  the  chauffeur. 

"As  for  Bob,  he  makes  me  almost  hate  him.  He's  so  pleased 
down  inside  at  seeing  us  worried  about  somebody  else  besides 
him.  Complacent, — -that's  it.  As  if  he'd  been  right  all  along, 
and  we  hadn't  understood  him — and  he'd  told  us  so." 

Frederica  had  noted  an  omission  from  this  catalogue. 

"It  must  be  awfully  hard  on  your  father,"  she  said. 

And,  for  a  full  minute  after  that  Constance  was  silent. 
"That's — awful !"  she  said  at  last,  and  the  gravity  of  her  voice 
gave  the  worn-out  word  its  full  significance.  "Of  course  he 
had  a  terrible  quarrel  with  Hugh  when  Hugh  told  him,  the 
afternoon  of  the  funeral,  what  he  was  going  to  do.  Like  an 
old-fashioned  father  in  a  book,  I  guess.  Turned  him  out — cut 
him  off  without  a  shilling,  and  all  that,  and  never  speaks  of 
him  at  all." 

"Hugh  has  some  money  of  his  own,  hasn't  he?"  Frederica 
asked,  and  Constance  nodded  absently. 

"Oh,  a  little.  We  got  a  hundred  thousand  dollars  apiece 
from  grandmother ;  and  a  few  odds  and  ends.  And  then  he's 
had  a  good  salary  ever  since  he  went  to  work." 

But  her  tone  showed  this  was  a  digression;  not  what  she 
was  thinking  about. 

"There's  something  else  with  father,"  she  went  on.    "It's 


174  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

worrying  all  of  us  and  we  don't  know  what  it  is,  except  .  .  . 
Well,  of  course,  nothing  was  done  about  grandfather's  estate 
until  after  the  funeral.  That  was  natural.  There  were  so 
many  other  things  to  do  and  think  about.  But  it's  been  two 
weeks  since  then,  and  we're  sure  father's  gone  down  and 
opened  up  the  boxes  at  the  bank.  But  he  hasn't  said  a  word 
to  anybody  about  what  he  found  there — grandfather's  will  and 
all — and  nobody's  dared  ask  him; — speak  to  him  hardly. 
Greg's  bothered  about  that  more  than  he  is  about  Hugh,  I 
believe." 

She  had  only  a  wry  little  smile  for  Frederica's  look  of  out 
right  consternation. 

"Oh,  it  wouldn't  be  very  nice,  of  course,"  she  conceded,  "to 
find  that  grandfather  had  left  everything  to  a  theological  sem 
inary,  or  an  aquarium,  or  anything  like  that.  Well,  in  the 
first  place,  I  don't  believe  he  did.  But,  if  I  had  my  choice 
between  that,  with  Hugh  back  again  safe  and  sound,  and — 
the  other  thing,  I'd  take  that." 

Frederica  looked  thoughtful.  "I  don't  know,"  she  said  at 
last.  "It  may  not  be  as  bad  as  you  think — about  Hugh,  I 
mean.  Evidently  the  girl  isn't  an  absolute  harpy,  or  she 
wouldn't  have  gone  away.  She'd  have  sat  tight  and  made  sure 
of  him  while  she  had  the  chance.  You've  never  seen  her,  have 
you?  I  suppose  she  might  be  somebody — really  straight  and 
— fine,  in  a  way.  Even  if  she  is  a  socialist  and  her  father  a 
murderer.  And  if  she  is,  it  would  give  a  sort  of — gorgeousness 
to  Hugh's  caring  for  her  .  .  ."  She  broke  off  there  and 
asked,  "What  is  it  ?"  in  response  to  a  sudden  look  which  Con 
stance  directed  at  her. 

But  Constance  said,  "Nothing."  And,  after  a  momentary 
silence,  Frederica  went  on  with  her  well-meant  attempt  to 
look  at  the  bright  side;  to  suggest,  at  least,  the  possibility 
that  there  was  a  bright  side  to  look  upon. 

Constance  didn't  dispute  the  possibility.  Almost  anything 
might  turn  out  better,  in  the  event,  than  a  first  look  at  it 
would  lead  one  to  suppose.  For  that  matter  there  was  a 
bright  side  to  the  consideration  of  Helena  as  the  merest  mer 
cenary  adventuress.  Because  then  the  marriage  would  go  to 


&IVERDALE  175 

smash  all  the  sooner.    But  Constance  doubted  if  she  was  that 
exactly. 

"There  is  nothing,  though,  to  her  having  gone  away/'  she 
went  on.  "She'd  made  some  sort  of  mistake  with  him.  He 
looked  ghastly  that  night  I  took  him  home  with  me.  And, 
from  what  he  said,  I  gathered  it  was  all  over.  Going  away 
might  have  heen  the  surest  move  she  had  for  making  him  fol 
low.  And  it's  maddening  to  think  that  hut  for  a  little  bit  of 
bad  luck — grandfather's  not  living  another  week — it  needn't 
have  happened.  Because,  out  at  home  there,  Jean  and  I  .  .  ." 

"Jean!"  Frederica  echoed.  "You  don't  mean  you  have 
told  that  child  .  .  .  !" 

" About  Hugh's  affairs  ?    Of  course  not.    We  took  pains  not 
to,  naturally.     Only  there's  something  about  her     . 
Hugh's  seen  it  from  the  first.    He's  always  been  happy  play 
ing  around  with  her.    Bather  gravely,  you  know.     She's  the 
sort  you  can  treat  that  way." 

"Is  it  a  sort  ?"  Frederica  speculated. 

"I  think  so,"  Constance  said.  "It's  the  simple  ones;  that 
just  are  what  they  are  and  never  try  for  effects.  Jean's  like 
that.  You  can't  imagine  her  posing — about  anything.  She 
adores  Hugh ;  has  ever  since  the  first  time  she  saw  him,  back 
at  Anne's  wedding,  that  was.  It  wouldn't  occur  to  her  to  try 
to  hide  it — any  more  than  it  would  to  try  to  play  it  up.  There 
it  has  been,  that's  all,  for  anybody  to  see  that  wanted  to  look." 

"But,  Connie !"  Frederica  protested,  "you  don't  mean  you're 
treating  a  thing  like  that — a  seventeen-year-old  child's  ro 
mance — seriously !" 

"I  wish  I  could  remember  back  when  I  was  seventeen," 
Constance  said.  "Maybe  it  wouldn't  help  much  if  I  could. 
Only  I'm  not  sure  life  was  such  a  joke,  then.  Anyhow,  I  have 
worried  about  it.  I  could  imagine — I  thought  I  could — the 
look  that  would  come  in  her  face  when  I  had  to  tell  her.  "Well, 
and  last  night  at  dinner  Mother  Crawford  got  started  talking 
about  it — what  a  fool  Hugh  was  making  of  himself,  and  how 
it  was  his  father's  fault  for  having  brought  him  up  the  way 
he  did — oh,  and  a  k»t  more.  Frank  tried  to  stop  her,  but  he 
couldn't.  I  suppose  she  had  forgotten  the  child  was  there,  or 


176  AN!   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

thought  she  was  talking  over  Her  head.  Cynical,  Hateful  cack 
ling,  that's  what  it  was — if  she  is  my  mother-in-law. 

"And  Jean  I  It  was  wonderful  to  see  the — the  pure  anger 
that  came  up  in  Her  face.  I  almost  hoped  she'd  turn  loose, 
but  of  course  she  didn't.  She  made  some  sort  of  excuse  to 
get  away  from  the  table  and  her  grandmother  never  noticed. 
I  found  her  up  in  her  room  afterward;  not  crying — just 
white. 

"Freddy,  she's  known  all  about  it — has  ever  since  she  camd 
back  from  San  Antonio.  I  don't  know  how.  Pieced  it  together, 
I  suppose — from  things  Frank  has  rapped  out  and  so  on.  And 
she  thinks  it's  splendid — what  you  meant,  I  suppose,  when  you 
said,  just  now,  that  there  was  a  sort  of  gorgeousness  about  it. 
She  takes  the  girl  absolutely  for  granted.  If  she  hadn't  been 
fine  and  good,  Hugh  wouldn't  have  fallen  in  love  with  her. 
She  adores  him  more  than  ever  for  his  having  had  the  courage 
to  defy  everybody  and  go  off  to  marry  her.  She  asked  me  if 
I  wasn't  proud  of  him,  too.  And,  somehow,  with  her  looking 
at  me  like  that,  I  was  ashamed  not  to  be.  I  believe  if  I  hadn't 
satisfied  her,  she'd  have  left  us — gone  back  to  Roger  and  Ethel. 
Without  any  flourishes,  you  know — just  gone. 

"But  I  did,  somehow,  and  we  had  a  long  talk.  She  said  one 
queer  thing.  She'd  actually  tried  to  tell  Hugh  that  she  was 
on  his  side.  It  was  when  they  were  out  on  the  sand,  the  morn 
ing  of  the  day  grandfather  died.  She'd  been  telling  him  some 
of  her  perplexities,  it  seems,  and  then  she  said  she  thought  it 
must  be  wonderful  to  have  things  to  do  that  there  wasn't  any 
doubt  about — clear  things  that  didn't  tangle  up.  She  meant 
that  thing  of  his.  That's  how  she  saw  it,  you  see.  She  couldn't 
come  any  closer  than  that,  but  she  hoped  he  understood." 

There  was  a  ruminative  silence  for  a  while,  and  then  Fred- 
erica  produced  a  diversion  by  commenting  upon  old  Mrs.  Craw 
ford's  presence  at  the  funeral.  She  must  have  come  straight 
home  from  the  boat  on  learning  of  old  Gregory's  death. 

Constance  nodded.  "She  never  liked  grandfather,"  she  ob 
served,  "but  somehow  they  got  on.  Both  old-timers,  of  course. 
And  then  she  is  pleased  to  have  outlived  him — though  she 
must  be  years  younger,  really." 


EIVERDALE  177 

It  was  at  the  end  of  another  long  silence,  a  while  later,  that 
Constance  got  up  to  go.  "What  I  can't  get  away  from,"  she 
said,  "is  their  faces — Mother  Crawford's,  there  at  the  dinner 
table  last  night,  while  she  was  thinking  up  and  saying  all  those 
witty  malicious  things — so  pleased  with  herself  because  she  had 
never  been  a  fool — and  Jean's  afterward.  And  Hugh's  at 
the  funeral.  I  sat  where  I  could  watch  him  all  the  way 
through.  There  was  a  sort  of — clarity  in  it,  just  as  there  was 
in  Jean's  last  night;  as  if  he  knew  what  he'd  have  to  go 
through — the  price  of  it  all,  you  know,  and  wasn't  afraid 
to  pay. 

"It  makes  me  feel  fat  and  soft  and  cowardly.  I  don't  know 
whether  there  is  something  the  matter  with  me  or  not.  I've 
been  through  more  or  less,  of  course.  There's  the  babies.  I 
tried  to  make  myself  believe,  last  night,  that  that  was  the  same 
thing.  But  it  isn't  exactly.  It  isn't  quite — facing  a  thing  in 
advance.  And  then,  it's  expected  of  you,  The  thing  I  mean 
is  what  people  call  being  a  fool.  I've  never  done  that, — no 
more  than  Mother  Crawford.  The  question  is,  whether  I' 
would  if  the  thing  was  there  to  do.  Jean  would,  there's  no 
doubt  of  that.  Oh  dear,  if  Hugh  could  only  have  waited  a 
few  years !" 

At  that,  in  order  not  to  cry,  Constance  took  her  leave  swiftly, 
and  went  back,  to  see  if  there  was  any  news,  to  her  father's 
house. 

She  met  him  in  the  hall  and  was  struck  by  a  change  in  his 
appearance.  He  looked — shrunken,  somehow,  like  a  man  who 
has  just  given  up  a  losing  fight.  Bather  surprisingly  to  her 
self,  she  stopped  and  kissed  him,  though  he  would  have  gone 
by  with  an  absent  nod. 

"I  haven't  seen  you  before  to-day,"  ehe  said  explanatorily. 

He  gazed  at  her  a  moment  rather  blankly,  then  said :  "I  am 
just  sending  off  a  telegram  to  your  brother.  He  has  informed 
us  that  his  marriage  has  taken  place.  J  am  sending  for  him  to 
come  home  at  once." 

"To  come  home !"  Constance  echoed  incredulously. 

A  grimace  of  pain  convulsed  his  face  and  he  turned  away 
from  her.  "Go  to  your  mother/'  he  said.  "She  can  explain." 


178  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

He  left  her  standing  there  and  went  away  to  the  telephone  to 
send  his  wire. 

The  mysterious  cause  of  Robert  Corbett's  behavior  during 
the  fortnight  between  the  funeral  and  the  day  when  Hugh's 
letter  came  in,  was  amply  explained  by  the  facts  which  Mrs. 
Corbett  had  ready  for  Constance. 

In  a  perfectly  natural — and  only  human — way,  Robert  Cor 
bett  had  been  looking  forward  for  many  years  to  the  day  when 
he  would  be  the  head  of  the  family.  He  had  never  had  any 
genuine  love  for  his  father.  The  difference  in  the  texture  of 
their  two  minds  forbade  it.  What  took,  satisfactorily,  its 
place  was  the  traditional  filial  respect  and  obedience.  It  is 
hardly  just  to  blame  him  for  feeling  vaguely  aggrieved  over 
the  long  postponement  of  his  coming  into  power  He  had  no 
sense  of  inferiority  to  his  father.  A  thoroughly  logical,  un 
imaginative  intelligence  always  finds  it  hard  to  appraise  at  its 
true  value,  an  illogical  intuitive  one.  When  old  Gregory's 
intuitions  led  him  wrong,  as  they  did  on  an  average  of  one 
time  in  three,  the  cause  of  the  error  was  always  nakedly  ap 
parent  to  Eobert.  On  the  other  hand,  when  the  old  man  went 
right,  his  Tightness  looked  to  Robert  mysterious — a  matter  of 
blind  luck.  If  the  son  had  ever  been  put  in  a  position  of  full 
responsibility,  where  he  stood  or  fell  by  his  own  unaided  ef 
forts,  he  might  have  learned  better.  But  the  father  never  gave 
him  a  chance.  This  was  one  of  old  Gregory's  many  mistakes. 

Robert,  then,  had  lived  along  for  the  past  twenty  years,  any 
how,  in  the  unshaken  conviction  that  he  could  pilot  the  Corbett 
ship  as  competently  as  his  father.  Another  conviction,  paral 
lel  to  and  supporting  it,  was  that  some  day  he  would  get  the 
opportunity. 

The  fundamental  principle  of  old  Gregory's  life  was  the 
perpetuation  of  his  clan.  He  wanted  the  line  to  run  unbroken 
for  many  generations.  It  was  the  only  sort  of  immortality  he 
genuinely  believed  in.  His  fortune,  which  was  another  way 
of  saying  his  power  and  his  place,  was  a  part  of  himself. 
Again  and  again  his  son  had  heard  him  speak  caustically  of 
the  folly  of  his  dead  contemporaries  who  had  allowed  the  en- 


EIVEEDALE  179 

terprises  that  bore  their  names,  to  fall  into  alien  Hands.  Rob 
ert  was  as  sure  as  he  was  sure  of  anything  in  the  world,  that 
his  father's  will,  when  it  was  opened,  would  be  found  to  have 
transferred  the  power  intact  to  him. 

He  had  come  home  from  his  father's  grave  the  head  of  the 
family — patriarch  of  the  tribe.  And,  to  him,  in  that  hour, 
had  come  Hugh  full  of  his  mad  determination  to  marry  the 
revolutionary  firebrand  whose  doings  had  already  caused  the 
tribe  immeasurable  annoyance  and  humiliation,  as  well  as  more 
ponderable  losses,  and  in  the  event,  had  resulted  in  his  father's 
death.  To  marry  an  enemy  like  that  was  more  than  folly. 
It  was  apostasy. 

The  question  of  the  Tightness  of  his  decree  of  banishment 
upon  Hugh,  asked  itself  and  was,  without  misgiving,  affirma 
tively  answered.  The  question  of  his  power  to  enforce  the 
decree  never  presented  itself  at  all. 

It  was  the  next  day  that  he  read  his  father's  will.  Old  Greg 
ory  had  dealt  his  son's  pride  many  a  blow,  but  never  so  heavy 
a  one  as  this  from  beyond  the  grave.  The  will  was  thought 
out  with  a  thoroughness  of  detail  which  the  old  man  was  ca 
pable  of,  but  seldom  exacted  of  himself.  It  had  been  drawn 
by  one  of  the  leaders  of  the  Chicago  bar,  and  so  clear  and  un 
mistakable  was  the  intent  of  it,  that  it  was  like  a  window  let 
into  the  old  man's  mind. 

About  half  the  value  of  the  estate  was  comprised  by  com 
mon  stock,  practically  the  entire  capitalization,  of  Corbett  & 
Company.  The  other  half  was  a  miscellaneous  list  of  invest 
ments,  nearly  all  very  high-class:  municipal  and  railway 
bonds,  and  a  few  standard  stocks.  About  the  only  speculative 
investment  he  appeared  to  have  made,  was  a  lot  of  steel  com 
mon  which  he  had  bought  in  the  twenties.  In  the  main,  his 
idea  had  been  that  whatever  profits  he  took  out  of  Corbett 
&  Company,  should  be  put  where  he  could  get  them  out  again 
at  need. 

It  was  from  this  outlying  part  of  the  estate  that  his  bequests 
to  various  charitable  and  religious  institutions  were  made,  a 
few  old  friends  and  servants — foremost  among  these,  Hannah 


180  Atf   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

— provided  for,  and  the  claims  of  all  the  members  of  his 
family  but  three,  satisfied.  These  three  were  his  son  Robert 
and  his  two  grandsons,  Gregory  and  Hugh. 

The  other  moiety  of  the  estate,  that  is  to  say,  Corbett  & 
Company,  together  with  its  various  subsidiary  enterprises,  Was 
put  into  a  trust,  the  trustees  being  the  three  heirs  just  named, 
the  trust  to  terminate  with  the  death  of  Robert.  There  were 
provisions  for  the  appointment,  in  case  either  or  both  the  sons 
pre-deceased  the  father,  of  other  trustees  to  take  their  places. 
The  income  of  the  trust  was  to  be  divided  equally  among  the 
three  of  them  while  Robert  lived.  At  his  death,  it  was  to  be 
divided  between  Gregory  and  Hugh. 

The  old  man  had  never  believed,  then, — this  was  the  upshot 
of  it, — that  his  son's  hands  were  strong  enough  to  steer  the 
ship  alone.  Robert  was  never  to  exercise  the  power,  never  to 
occupy  the  place  in  the  eyes  of  the  world,  that  old  Gregory  had 
exercised  and  occupied.  The  Great  Seal  was  to  be  placed, 
during  his  lifetime,  in  commission. 

And  his  one  decree,  Hugh's  banishment,  was  by  this  in 
strument,  revoked.  Hugh  had  now  as  much  authority  as  he; 
was  expressly  entitled  to  his  seat  at  the  council-table  and  was 
made,  in  his  own  right,  a  rich  man. 

It  was  this  last  consideration  that  had  been  the  cause  of 
Robert's  silence  during  the  whole  of  that  Intolerable  fortnight. 
It  was  his  belief,  the  wish  being  father  to  the  thought,  that 
this  woman  who  had  infatuated  his  son,  had  done  so  from  a 
mercenary  motive.  Hugh  had  started  in  pursuit  of  her  under 
the  belief  that  he  was  cut  off  from  the  family  fortune,  that 
he  had  no  income  except  the  small  one  his  maternal  grand 
mother  had  left  him,  and  no  prospects  except  those  that  he 
could  carve  out  for  himself.  There  was  no  doubt  that  Hugh 
would  acquaint  the  woman  of  these  facts.  He  was  likely, 
indeed,  in  his  honesty,  to  paint  them  blacker  than  they  really 
were.  Anyhow,  he  would  not  appear  to  her  the  rich  prize  she 
had  set  out  to  capture.  It  was  possible,  Robert  thought,  a 
chance  worth  taking,  that  she  would  refuse  him — set  her  sails 
for  richer  booty  that  might  be  on  the  horizon  somewhere. 


EIYERDALE  181 

So,  locking  up  the  steel  boxes  as  he  locked  his  lips,  he  waited 
and  clung  to  his  hope — not  a  very  buoyant  one,  to  be  sure — 
as  desperately  as  though  it  had  been  better.  Hugh's  letter,  of 
course,  made  an  end  of  that. 


CHAPTER  XIV 

HUGH  and  Helena  had  settled  transitorily  in  a  family 
hotel  whose  front  windows  commanded  a  glimpse  of 
Gramercy  Park.  It  was  not  very  cheap  nor  very  dirty 
nor  very  old,  though  it  was  a  little  of  each;  not  quite  impos 
sible,  in  a  word,  from  any  one  of  a  dozen  points  of  view ;  and 
its  position — almost  on  the  Park — gave  it  a  faint  tinge  of  de 
sirability.  The  pair  happened  upon  it  and  out  of  an  intense 
preoccupation  with  vastly  more  important  matters,  established 
themselves  forthwith  in  a  suite  comprising  parlor,  bedroom 
and  bath  and  an  entrance  hall  whose  dimensions  were  deter 
mined  by  the  width  of  the  doors. 

It  was  not  until  the  eighth  day  that  Hugh  came  out  of  a 
brown  study  to  a  sort  of  microscopic  awareness  of  the  dirt  in 
the  splintered  cracks  of  the  hardwood  floors,  the  vicious  ugli 
ness  of  the  furniture  and  the  sodden  rugs,  the  gaping  de 
ficiencies  of  the  plumbing.  Whatever  else  they  did  they  must 
get  out  of  here.  But,  of  course,  they  were  going  to,  anyway. 
That  much  had  been  decided — at  all  events.  Hadn't  it  ?  But 
"decided"  was  not  the  conclusive  word  that,  in  his  bachelor 
simplicity,  he  had  supposed  it  to  be. 

Were  they  happy — this  strangely  mated  pair?  Hugh — left 
that  morning  with  his  thoughts  for  company — had  glanced  at 
the  question  somewhat  nervously,  then  answered  it  with  a  vig 
orous  affirmative.  Only  the  word  wanted  a  little  defining. 
Happiness  was  not  a  mere  vegetable  contentment.  It  was 
not,  even,  the  negation  of  its  opposite.  A  certain  amount  of 
unhappiness  was,  probably,  a  necessary  ingredient  of  it. 
Otherwise  one  would  take  it  too  much  for  granted  to  be  thor 
oughly  aware  of  it.  Even  an  occasional  violent  quarrel — with 
its  ensuing  reconciliation  and  the  broadening  of  the  basis  of 
mutual  understanding — was,  he  supposed,  a  thing  no  husband 
and  wife  could  be  said  to  be  truly  happy  without. 

182 


EIVEEDALE  183 

He  and  Helena  had  not  had,  though,  so  far,  quite  a  fair 
chance.  Hugh  had  known,  of  course,  that  their  marriage 
would  cause  a  certain  amount  of  newspaper  comment,  but  he 
had  been  fairly  dazed  by  the  cloud-burst  of  publicity  that  they 
were  caught  out  in — had  hardly  come  out  of  yet.  Those  were, 
it  should  be  noted,  the  forgotten — almost  unrealizable — days 
before  the  war;  days  when  there  was  nothing  much  for  the 
papers  to  print  but  politics  and  baseball.  So  the  marriage  of 
a  Chicago  multi-millionaire  (since  in  current  journalese  every 
man  who  can  afford  to  ride  in  a  taxi  is  a  millionaire  it  was 
necessary  to  use  a  more  grandiloquent  term  for  the  grandson 
of  a  genuine  one)  to  the  daughter  of  a  famous  anarchist — 
martyr  or  murderer  according  as  one  looked  at  it,  was  worth 
black  head-lines,  double  leaded  columns,  interviews  by  promi 
nent  clergymen,  and  photographs — genuine  where  possible — 
of  the  newly  married  couple  getting  into  cabs,  eating  breakfast 
and  so  on. 

At  first  Hugh  writhed  under  this.  It  was  not  the  publica 
tion  of  facts,  however  private  and  intimate,  that  distressed 
him,  but  the  successive  refractions  of  these  facts  through  the 
minds  of  a  reporter,  a  re-write  man,  and  a  head-line  concocter, 
so  that  when  they  appeared  on  the  page  they  had  all  the  banal 
horror  of  a  third-rate  moving  picture  scenario.  But  he  grew 
philosophical  when  he  saw  how  little  his  wife  minded  it.  The 
people  it  hurt  the  worst,  of  course,  were  not  under  his  eye — 
nor  in  his  thoughts  more  than  he  could  help. 

The  hullabaloo  had,  rather  absurdly,  one  really  important 
result.  On  the  second  day  after  the  news  of  their  marriage 
was  published,  a  special  messenger  came  to  the  hotel  with  a 
note  to  Helena  from  the  editor  of  a  newspaper  magazine  say 
ing  that  he  was  delighted  to  accept  a  story  of  hers  which  she 
had  submitted  to  him  a  few  weeks  ago  (It  was  the  very  story 
she  had  read  to  Hugh,  as  it  happened),  that  he  was  enclosing 
herewith  a  check  for  two  hundred  dollars — hoping  she  would 
find  the  amount  satisfactory;  and  finally,  that  he  earnestly 
wished  she  might  find  time  to  come  to  his  office  for  a  talk 
about  future  work. 

That  check  meant  an  enormous  lot  to  Helena,  intrinsically, 


184  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

since  it  was  by  far  the  largest  lump  sum  she  had  ever  received ; 
but  infinitely  more  as  a  symbol.  It  was  the  realization,  she 
told  Hugh,  of  the  dream  of  her  life.  Everything  she  had  done 
since  the  law  took  her  father  away  from  her,  had  been  in  prep 
aration — -unconscious  sometimes,  to  be  sure — for  a  career  as 
an  author.  It  was  by  the  printed  word  in  the  guise  of  mere 
stories  that  the  seeds  of  the  revolution  could  best  be  sown. 

Well,  she  was  an  author  now.  She  had  got  through  the 
guarded  gate  into  the  sacred  enclosure  where  they  pastured. 
Her  troubles  were  over.  Why,  she'd  written  that  story  over 
night  !  And  here  was  two  hundred  dollars  in  payment  for  it ! 
The  independence  it  gave  her  and  promised  to  make  perpetual, 
removed  the  last  misgivings  she  had  felt  about  her  consent  to 
a  marriage  with  Hugh. 

That  consent  had  not  been  won  from  her,  of  course,  with 
out  many  concessions  and  promises  on  his  part.  She  was  to  be 
allowed  to  live  her  own  life  absolutely,  just  as  he  was  to  be 
allowed  to  live  his.  But  that  promised  independence  might 
have  turned  out  to  be  rather  illusory,  if  it  could  have  been  en 
joyed  only  at  the  price  the  old  hard  drudgery  had  exacted. 

Hugh  did  not  quite  share  her  confidence  in  the  permanence 
of  this  roseate  state  of  things.  He  had  got  the  idea  from  Barry 
Lake  that  making  a  living  by  literature  was  harder  work  than 
an  occasional  wild  night  of  scribbling  came  to.  But  her  child 
like  pleasure  and  confidence — the  way  she  laughed  when  she 
hugged  him  and  read  the  letter  again  and,  absurdly,  kissed 
the  check,  supplied  a  new  note  in  the  gamut  of  his  emotions 
for  her — a  note  he  had  hardly  been  aware  before  was  missing. 
For  the  first  time  he  liked  as  well  as  loved  her. 

If  only  they  could  have  gone  on  like  that,  carrying  out 
their  plans  for  a  flat  of  their  own,  here  on  the  Park,  perhaps — 
a  chemist's  job  for  Hugh — there  wouldn't  be  any  trouble  about 
that — and  a  career  for  Helena;  friends — her  friends  at  first, 
growing  in  time  to  be  his  as  well;  adventures,  such  as  the 
fomentation  of  a  likely  strike  here  and  there,  but  with  the 
sharp  tearing  edge  of  them  taken  off  by  the  new  security 
offered  by  a  home — a  husband — a  practical  income ! 

Helena's  plans,  you  will  note;  but,  for  a  few  days,  Hugh 


KIVERDALE  185 

was  able  to  share  them  with  her.  And  then  came  his  father's 
telegram  and,  on  its  heels,  the  lawyer's  letter  with  all  the  as 
tonishing  corroboratory  facts  about  his  grandfather's  will  and 
the  great  place  and  responsibility  it  forced  upon  him. 

The  telegram,  which  was  long  and  contained  all  the  bones 
of  the  thing,  was  delivered  to  Hugh  while  Helena  was  out 
making  her  call,  by  appointment,  upon  that  magazine  editor. 
And  she  came  back  to  him  in  a  state  of  effervescent  excitement 
over  the  interview.  She  was  to  be  a  regular  weekly  contribu 
tor.  Her  stories  were  to  appear  simultaneously  in  half  a  hun 
dred  Sunday  newspapers.  The  rich  and  poor — that  was  to 
be  the  theme  of  them.  Sharp-edged  little  sketches,  with  a 
punch,  illustrative,  Helena  confided  to  her  husband — though 
naturally  she  had  not  pointed  out  the  fact  to  the  editor — of  the 
bitter  injustice  of  the  capitalistic  organization  of  society ;  fat 
employers  and  their  shivering  employees ;  rich,  worthless  ladies 
and  their  maids,  and  so  on.  In  fictional  form,  of  course,  but 
that  didn't  matter.  The  truth  would  show  through. 

It  was  a  bad  moment  for  the  production  of  Hugh's  telegram. 
But  he  was  too  candid  to  have  held  it  back  in  the  hope  of  a 
better  one  turning  up  later.  So  he  handed  it  to  her  without 
a  word,  and  only  when  she  had  read  it  through  and  looked 
up  at  him  with  a  blankly  incredulous  stare,  he  said : 

"I'm  afraid  it  means  we  shall  have  to  go  back  to  Chicago.9* 

The  thing  in  all  its  bearings — in  all  its  multifarious  impli 
cations,  was  too  much,  of  course,  for  her  to  grasp  in  a  moment 
like  that,  and  it  was  characteristic  of  her  that  instead  of  set 
tling  down  to  wrestle  with  the  problem,  as  Hugh  had  been 
wrestling  for  an  hour  before  she  came  in,  suspending  judg 
ment  until  she  had  managed  to  see  her  way  clearly  all  around 
it,  she  snatched  at  the  obvious  emotional  aspect  of  the  thing 
and  ignored  the  rest.  In  ten  minutes  she  had  whipped  herself 
up  into  a  fury. 

What  did  he  owe  that  precious  family  of  his!  Wasn't  it 
their  own  doing  that  he  had  had  to  choose  between  them  and 
her?  And  hadn't  he  finally  chosen  her, — after  having  taken 
a  good  long  while  to  think  about  it  ?  Now  he  was  talking  of 
going  back  to  them  and  dragging  her  back  with  him,  to  the 


186  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

sacrifice  of  her  career,  to  say  nothing  of  his  own.  That  was 
what  he  wanted,  was  it,  now  that  he  had  the  chance?  To 
settle  down  into  a  fat  pompous  respectability,  with  her  for  a 
domestic  slave,  the  helpless  butt  for  all  the  scornful  indigni 
ties  his  purse-proud  family  would  put  upon  her  ?  He  thought 
they'd  have  to  go  back,  did  he !  Well,  he  could  think  again. 
As  far  as  the  money  was  concerned,  he'd  get  that  anyhow, 
wouldn't  he,  whether  he  went  back  or  not  ? 

He  tfught,  it  may  be  admitted,  to  have  left  it  at  that  for  a 
while,  and  given  her  time  to  cool  down  and  visualize  the  thing 
for  herself  in  her  own  way.  But  tactful  indirection  was  no 
more  an  attribute  of  Hugh's  than  a  capacity  for  straight  seri 
ous  thinking  was  one  of  Helena's.  He  steamed  straight  ahead 
like  a  liner  into  the  teeth  of  the  gale,  with  reasons,  arguments. 

That  monstrous  plant  out  at  Riverdale  whose  direction  old 
Gregory's  will  confided  in  part  to  him,  was  a  sorer  problem 
now  than  it  had  been  last  May  when  Helena  herself  had 
swooped  down  upon  it  and  headed  that  little  delegation  of  core- 
makers  in  Bailey's  office.  By  that  act  of  hers  she  had  assumed 
a  moral  responsibility  of  her  own,  as  grave  as  his.  The  strike 
she  had  started  was  still  dragging  bitterly  on — half  lost,  lead- 
erless,  losing  power  from  week  to  week.  If  it  protracted  itself 
into  the  winter  the  hunger  and  cold  and  despair  would  cause 
incalculable  suffering.  Now,  as  things  had  somewhat  ironi 
cally  fallen  out,  he  and  Helena  had  a  chaoice  put  into  their 
hands  to  do  something.  There  was  simply  no  question  in  his 
mind  as  to  their  duty  in  the  matter. 

Going  back  to  the  family  would  present,  no  doubt,  some  awk 
ward  and  painful  moments,  though  it  would  be  nothing  like 
as  bad  as  Helena,  really  absurdly,  made  out.  The  rest  of  the 
family  weren't  monsters  any  more  than  he  was.  She'd  find 
them  perfectly  tolerable,  even  at  first,  and  eventually,  he  was 
sure,  likable. 

He  was  not  able,  of  course,  to  complete  a  consecutive  state 
ment  like  that,  because  intervening  gusts  of  her  temper,  every 
now  and  then,  blew  it  all  to  rags.  They  didn't  quarrel  all  the 
time,  either,  by  any  means,  during  the  three  or  four  days 


EIYERDALE  187 

while  the  discussion  went  on.  There  were  periods  of  what 
looked  like  the  most  tranquil  calm,  when,  by  their  talk  and 
actions,  you'd  have  supposed  that  no  difference  between  them 
had  ever  arisen;  periods,  too,  when  they  made  love  to  each 
other  whole-heartedly.  And  then,  in  the  wake  of  these  latter, 
generally,  the  tempest  would  burst  again  as  if  its  violence  had 
never  been  checked. 

They  fought  pretty  much  over  the  same  ground,  beginning 
as  a  rule,  not  where  they  had  left  off,  but  where  they  had  last 
begun.  Hugh  did  indeed  make  one  suggestion  in  the  belief 
that  he  had  hit  upon  a  valid  compromise.  They  needn't  live 
in  Chicago — needn't  try  to  amalgamate  themselves  into  the 
family.  They  could  go  to  Eiverdale  instead;  live  in  one  of 
the  worker's  cottages  and  upon  workers'  fare.  That  would  be 
best  all  around,  perhaps,  in  the  guarantee  it  gave  to  both  sides 
of  the  good  faith  of  their  endeavors.  But  the  passionate  con 
viction  of  Helena's  veto  upon  that  proposal  abolished  it  so 
that  it  was  as  if  it  had  never  been. 

It  was  her  counter-proposal  that  they  presently  settled  down 
to.  Hugh  could  do  as  he  liked  of  course.  If  he  felt  responsi 
ble  for  the  management  of  Corbett  &  Company,  why,  he 
might  go  ahead  and  manage — so  far  as  his  father  and  brother 
would  let  him — which  would  not,  in  her  opinion,  go  very  far, 
nor  take  very  much  of  his  time.  She  would  remain  here  in 
New  York,  going  ahead  with  the  work  which  had  just  opened 
up  before  her.  Whenever  his  duties  left  him  leisure,  he  could 
come  back  to  her.  She'd  be  frightfully  unhappy  during  his 
absences,  of  course,  but  that  couldn't  be  helped.  She  realized 
that  she  had  no  more  right  to  dictate  to  him  than  he  had  to 
dictate  to  her. 

And  if  he  was  going  out  there — temporarily,  of  course — why 
she  supposed  the  sooner  he  went,  the  better.  Perhaps  when 
he  came  back  he'd  have  a  freer  mind ;  be  ready  once  more  to 
be  her  husband  and  lover  again,  instead  of  the  solemn  slave  of 
duty  he  was  now. 

At  the  end  of  that  statement  she  came  swiftly  over  to  where 
he  sat,  knelt  at  his  knees,  pulled  his  head  down  to  her  and 


188  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

kissed  it,  and  then  for  a  while  wept  quietly  in  his  embrace. 
Later  they  went  down  to  dinner  at  the  Lafayette,  and,  in  a 
taxi,  to  The  Follies  afterward. 

It  was  the  next  morning  that  Hugh  sat,  as  I  have  exhibited 
him  to  you,  alone  in  their  sitting-room,  trying  to  make  up  his 
mind  what  to  do.  Helena  had  left  him,  immediately  after 
breakfast,  in  search  of  material  for  the  next  story.  It  hadn't 
come  quite  so  easily  as  she  expected,  but  of  course  there  was 
reason  enough  for  that.  The  note  of  their  parting  had  been 
good-humored  enough,  though  her  farewell  injunction,  jocu 
larly  meant,  to  be  sure,  had  been  perhaps  a  trifle  heavy- 
handed.  If  he  went  off  to  Chicago  before  she  came  back,  he 
was  to  leave  a  note. 

He  did  mean  to  start — for  only  a  few  days  of  course — some 
time  within  twenty-four  hours.  He  had  hoped  to  take  the 
fast  afternoon  train,  but  of  course  would  not  now,  unless  she 
came  back  in  time. 

She  did  come  in  just  as  he  was  thinking  about  going  out 
to  lunch,  flushed,  bright-eyed  with  excitement  over,  she  said, 
the  successful  quest  of  her  story.  She  had  a  letter  for  him 
which  the  clerk  at  the  desk  down-stairs  had  handed  to  her — 
not  a  business  letter,  but  written  on  note-paper  and  addressed 
in  a  woman's  hand,  and  the  casual  air  with  which  she  held  it 
out  was,  perhaps,  a  little  exaggerated. 

He  had  been  secretly  hoping,  for  two  or  three  days,  for 
letters  that  looked  like  that;  especially  for  one  from  his 
mother  or  Constance.  The  possibility  occurred  to  him  now  that 
Helena  had  been  hoping  for  them,  too.  The  interchange  of 
telegrams  with  his  father  accounted  well  enough,  to  be  sure, 
for  the  failure  of  them.  They  had  taken  it  for  granted  that 
he  was  coming  straight  back.  But  the  handwriting  on  this 
letter  was  one  he  did  not  know  and  he  opened  it  curiously, 
aware  that  Helena's  eyes  sought  and  did  not  leave  his  face. 
This  is  what  he  read: — 

"Dear  Hugh: 

"Your  new  happiness  makes  me  very  happy,  too.  I  don't 
believe  I  need  tell  you  that.  I  tried  to  tell  you,  that  day  we 


EIVERDALE  189 

built  the  sand-castle,  how  much  I  hoped  it  would  come  out 
right,  but  I  was  afraid  to.    Now  that  it  has,  I  can. 

"Will  you  please  give  my  love — my  real  love — to  Helena. 
(Will  she  let  me  call  her  that?)  If  you  come  back  to  Chicago 
soon  (next  week)  I  shall  see  you.  But  if  not,  it  will  be  a 
long  time  because  father  has  been  detailed  on  a  military  mis 
sion  to  England  and  mother  and  I  go  with  him.  It  is  all  very 
unexpected  and  exciting,  only  it  makes  me  feel,  somehow,  a 
little  homesick,  too.  I  hope  you  will  come  before  I  go. 

"Lovingly  always, 

"JEAN." 

He  did  not  read  it  aloud,  but  when  he  came  to  the  end, 
handed  it  over  to  Helena,  indescribably  warmed  by  the  simple 
affection  of  it,  just  as  he  always  was  by  the  sight  of  the  child, 
or  the  thought  of  her. 

He  watched  his  wife's  face  while  she  read,  for  a  reflection 
of  the  same  feeling  there.  But  it  was  not  what  he  saw.  She 
asked,  rather  trenchantly,  when  she  reached  the  signature, 
"Who's — Jean?"  and  the  sharpness  of  the  question  took  him 
by  surprise. 

Who  was  she,  anyhow,  besides  just — Jean  ?  He  actually  had 
to  cast  about  for  an  answer.  "Jean  Gilbert?"  he  said.  "Why, 
she's  old  Mrs.  Crawford's  granddaughter." 

His  wife  laughed  and  tossed  the  letter  contemptuously  on 
the  table.  "I  know  who  she  is  well  enough,"  she  said.  "She's 
the  girl  they  wanted  you  to  marry  and  that  hoped  to  marry 
you  herself.  Sends  her  love  to  me,  does  she?  I  know  the 
kind  of  love  that  is." 

Hugh  stared  at  her.    It  was  as  if  she  had  spat  in  his  face. 

"She's  a  child !"  he  managed  to  say  at  last,  and  it  was  not 
until  she  heard  his  voice  that  she  looked  at  him.  "She's  my 
sister's  niece.  She's  :.:  .  ."  But  he  couldn't  manage  to 
go  any  further. 

By  now  Helena  was  gazing  at  him  as  if  behind  his  eyes  she 
read  some  secret.  He  turned  away.  Already  his  anger  was 
passing.  His  wife's  mistake  was  perhaps  excusable  enough, 
but  her  gaze  followed  him  as  if  it  meant  to  extort  a  confession. 


190  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

He  could  find,  somehow,  nothing  to  say.  Then,  suddenly,  with 
a  rush,  she  went  into  their  bedroom  and  slammed  and  locked 
the  door  between  them.  He  made  no  effort  to  induce  her  to 
let  him  in.  Went  over  and  sat  down  in  a  chair  by  the  window. 

He  was  not  angry  at  all  now.  Only  a  curious  blanknees  had 
settled  over  him.  He  was  like  one  waking  and  finding  himself 
in  a  strange  place,  unable  to  explain  how  he  happened  to  be 
there.  Who  was  it  who  had  just  slammed  the  door?  Why 
didn't  the  sleep  from  which  the  sound  had  awakened  him,  dis 
cover  him  in  his  own  bed  in  his  father's  house? 

It  was  more  than  an  hour  later  when  Helena  came  out  in 
a  silken  negligee, — her  tears  washed  away,  all  her  strange 
exotic  beauty  enhanced  by  the  misty  tenderness  with  which 
she  came  to  him  and  asked  to  be  forgiven. 

He  did  forgive  her  easily  enough  and  she  curled  up  in  his 
lap  and  slid  a  caressing  bare  arm  around  his  neck.  After  a 
while  she  said: 

"I'll  go  back  to  Chicago  with  you,  Hugh,  if  you  want  me  to. 
Only  you  must  wait  a  week  or  two  till  I  can  buy  some  clothes. 
I'm  going  to  try  to  be  a  credit  to 


CHAPTER  XV 

GETTING  Helena's  clothes,  such  as  would  make  it  pos 
sible  for  her  to  be  a  credit  to  him,  turned  out  to  be  only 
one  of  a  number  of  things  to  delay  Hugh's  return  with 
her  to  Chicago.  It  was  the  better  part  of  a  month  before  they 
really  packed  up  and  went.  Hugh  surprised  himself  by  taking 
these  successive  postponements  as  good-naturedly  as  he  did. 

He  felt  strongly,  to  be  sure,  the  urgency  of  getting  back  and 
beginning  the  thing  that  Destiny  appeared  to  have  marked  out 
as  his  life's  work ;  life's  struggle,  he  expected  it  would  amount 
to;  the  effort  to  bring  it  about  that  the  bulk  of  his  grand 
father's  great  fortune  should  be  administered — well,  in  the 
general  direction  of  the  millennium,  (Hugh  allowed  himself  a 
deprecatory  smile  over  this  way  of  putting  it,  but  it  expressed 
about  what  he  meant,  just  the  same)  rather  than  for  the  mere 
aggrandizement  of  its  possessors. 

The  first  campaign  on  his  hands  would  be  the  settlement  of 
the  strike.  He  was  under  no  illusion  that  this  would  be  an 
easy  thing  to  do,  that  any  comfortable  short-cut  to  peace,  pros 
perity  and  good-will  awaited  discovery  offhand.  It  would 
be  a  long  pull  and,  if  the  task  were  to  be  accomplished  before 
winter  added  its  own  miseries  to  those  the  strikers  were  already 
suffering,  there  was  not  a  day  to  be  lost. 

Still  the  fact  was,  though  he  felt  sheepish  about  admitting 
it,  that  each  new  postponement  Helena  proposed,  was  a  re 
prieve  for  him.  Now  that  it  was  a  settled  fact  that  they  were 
to  go  back  again,  he  was  enjoying  this  transitory  irresponsible 
existence  in  the  shabby  family  hotel  just  off  Gramercy  Park. 
He  had,  pardonably  enough,  gone  a  little  slack  and  indolent 
after  the  emotional  tempests  of  the  past  three  months,  and  it 
was  in  the  comfortable  mood  of  an  idle  observer  that  he  sur 
veyed  his  wife's  activities  and  acquainted  himself  with  her 
friends. 

191 


193  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

These  friends  of  Helena's  were  a  bewildering  lot  to  Hugh. 
There  was  apparently  no  end  to  them.  They  lived  in  little 
colonies — nests  and  warrens  were  words  Hugh  was  tempted  to 
use — all  over  the  metropolitan  district  of  New  York.  The 
first  thing  that  struck  Hugh  about  them  was  their  variety. 
There  were  Eussian  Jews,  Irish,  Italians,  English,  French, 
surprisingly  few  Germans  (Hugh  asked  Helena  about  this 
and  got  the  information  that  the  Germans  were  mostly  ortho 
dox  socialists)  and  surprisingly  many  simon  pure  Americans 
— Yankee-Americans.  The  variegation  of  the  cultural  back 
grounds  they  represented  made  a  veritable  crazy-quilt.  But 
the  insoluble  riddle  to  Hugh  lay  in  their  similarity.  The 
possession  of  some  quality  of  mind,  which  he  could  not  formu 
late  nor  define,  made  all  these  madly  diversified  people  exactly 
alike. 

To  take  an  illustration  at  random :  there  were  Stone,  whose 
father  was  a  Baptist  minister  in  a  small  town  near  Dubuque, 
Iowa,  a  homely,  lean,  slow-spoken  chap;  his  wife,  Hilda 
Nikova,  a  white-faced,  eager,  wire-drawn  little  creature,  who 
had  never  been  outside  the  Pale  until,  at  eighteen,  she  had 
been  smuggled  across  the  frontier  by  friends,  after  the  raid 
that  had  sent  her  father  and  three  brothers  to  Siberia;  and 
their  great  friend  Minetti,  a  Milanese  factory-hand.  These 
three  could  argue,  when  together,  by  the  hour,  finding  minutise 
to  disagree  about,  to  be  sure,  but  in  complete  agreement  about 
essentials.  These  essentials  were  not  so  much  facts,  Hugh 
noted,  as  modes  of  feeling. 

The  thing  they  were  all  effervescing  with  just  then,  was  the 
waiters'  strike  in  New  York  City.  Hilda  was  one  of  the  lead 
ers  of  this.  She  and  her  husband  were  financially  pretty  well 
off,  for  he  was  an  article  writer  of  good  repute,  able  to  sell  his 
wares  to  the  standard  magazines  at  rather  better  than  stan 
dard  prices. 

Hilda  wrote,  too,  by  spurts,  but  for  weeks  now  she  had 
been  devoting  herself  with  febrile  enthusiasm  to  the  organiza 
tion  of  the  waiters.  She  had  gone  from  one  hotel  to  another, 
staying  as  a  guest  in  each,  until  an  indignant  management 
put  her  out,  making  converts,  inventing  ingenious  methods  of 


BIVERDALE  193 

sabotage  (nothing  could  be  more  discouraging  to  guests  than 
soap  in  the  soup,  and  this  was  one  of  the  most  innocent  of 
Hilda's  devices)  and  passionately  addressing  little  meetings  of 
the  faithful  in  secret  and  unlikely  places. 

The  strike  had  come  off  and  was  going  on  nicely,  getting  a 
huge  publicity,  of  course,  as  that  sort  of  strike  was  certain  to 
do ;  and  Hilda  was  in  high  feather  about  it.  She  didn't  be 
lieve  there  was  a  hotel  left  in  New  York  where  they  would 
permit  her  to  register.  And  while,  of  course,  it  was  not  pos 
sible  that  all  unfair  eating-houses  in  the  city  should  be  pick 
eted,  a  sufficient  number  were  to  make  a  very  impressive  dem 
onstration. 

But  then  a  most  unfortunate  incident  occurred.  The  pick 
ets  around  one  of  the  hotels,  one  night,  picked  up  a  scab  waiter, 
ran  him  off  into  a  quiet  side  street,  and,  to  put  it  bluntly, 
kicked  him  to  death.  It  was  not  until  the  next  morning  that 
the  discovery  was  made  that  this  victim  of  direct  action  was 
not  a  waiter  at  all,  nor  a  scab;  he  was  a  clerk,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  in  the  employ  of  an  express  company,  and  the  sole 
support  of  a  mother  and  two  young  sisters. 

Hilda  was  deeply  distressed  about  this  mistake — genuinely 
upset  about  it — a  state  of  mind  in  which  all  her  friends  sym 
pathized,  finding  what  consolations  they  could,  but  without 
making  much  headway  in  that  direction  with  Hilda.  But  the 
next  time  they  saw  her,  she  was  comforted.  It  wasn't  so  bad, 
after  all.  The  coroner's  inquest  had  revealed  the  fact  that 
the  man  was  tubercular  anyway;  hadn't  had  more  than  six 
months,  probably,  to  live.  The  economic  loss  was  not  great — 
practically  negligible.  And  the  man's  real  murderers,  as  any 
one  could  see,  were  not  Hilda's  too-impetuous  pickets,  but  the 
stock-holders  in  the  soulless  corporation  whose  wage-slave  the 
unfortunate  man  had  been. 

Hugh's  incredulous  stare,  leaving  Hilda's  big-eyed,  delicate 
little  face  to  travel  round  over  the  others,  saw  that  they  all 
took  it  in  exactly  the  same  way. 

Well,  there  it  was,  the  thing  he  couldn't  define,  that  made 
them  alike;  big,  slow,  kindly  Stone;  sharp-nosed,  pale-eyed 
little  Shayne,  the  Irish  schoolmaster,  Minetti  with  his  thick 


194  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

neck  and  his  kinky  auburn  hair,  Albertine  Ellis  (Albertine's 
delight  was  to  be  as  mysterious  as,  with  her  wide-set  narrow 
eyes,  she  looked.  But  she  forfeited  ^this  effect  with  Hugh  by 
speaking  with  the  unmistakable  Pennsylvania  twist  his  ears 
had  grown  familiar  with  in  Youngstown) — they  all  weighed 
that  incident  in  the  same  kind  of  balance. 

All  the  same,  Hugh  admired  most  of  them  enormously. 
Each  of  them  represented  some  sort  of  triumph  over  a  hostile 
environment — a  thing  which  made  him  feel  very  humble.  He 
marveled  over  their  vast — so  it  seemed  to  him — knowledge. 
They  didn't  emotionalize  much — not  for  each  other,  that  is. 
When  one  of  them  got  up  on  a  street  corner  soap-box  it  was  dif 
ferent,  of  course.  But  among  themselves  they  dealt  in  facts ;  or 
at  least  what  passed  unchallenged  for  facts.  Often  these  were 
minutely  statistical,  even  when  they  were  dealing  with  subjects 
whose  statistics  would  be,  one  would  think,  difficult  to  compile. 
They  were  fond,  too,  of  "inside  facts" — the  sort  of  facts  that 
never  by  any  possibility  found  their  way  into  print — not  even 
in  the  articles  which  Stone  himself  wrote  for  the  magazines ; 
though  his  talk  was  a  perfect  mine  of  them. 

Another  thing  that  kept  Hugh  humble  was  their  ability  to 
speak  foreign  languages.  Hugh  could  read  metallurgical  mon 
ographs  pretty  well  in  German  and  in  French,  but  nothing 
could  have  induced  him  to  attempt  a  spoken  sentence  in  any 
language  but  his  own.  You  may  remember  how  Helena's  pro 
ficiency  in  languages  had  impressed  him.  These  others, 
though  by  no  means  as  remarkable  in  this  direction  as  she, 
still  managed  to  make  themselves  understood  satisfactorily 
across  all  sorts  of  linguistic  boundaries.  And  even  when  they 
talked  English,  the  scope  of  their  references  took  in  literatures 
that  Hugh  had  never  heard  of.  He  would  walk  home  with 
Helena  after  an  evening  of  this  sort  of  thing,  feeling,  as  he 
had  once  confessed  to  his  mother,  like  an  ignorant  schoolboy. 

He  was  getting  on  with  Helena.  There  was  less  rack  and 
strain.  There  were  fewer  tempests.  There  was  a  warmer, 
kindlier  affection  between  them  ju-st  now  than  there  had  been 
at  any  previous  stage  of  the  affair.  She  was  about  as  near 
perfectly  happy  as  it  was  possible  for  one  of  her  temper  to  be. 


RIVERDALE  195 

In  this  little  group  where  I  have  just  indicated  her, — there 
were  half  a  dozen  others  that  would  serve  as  well  for  illus 
tration — sitting  at  a  table  in  an  Italian  restaurant  down  on 
West  Thirteenth  Street,  perhaps,  with  Hilda  and  Albertine, 
Stone,  Minetti  and  Shayne,  with  her  husband  for  audience, 
she  was  quite  at  her  best.  Their  idiom  was  one  her  mind  was 
completely  at  home  in;  her  father's  phrases  flashed  like  ar 
rows;  her  mother's  beauty  kindled  to  an  absolute  radiance. 
She  was  the  queen  of  them — their  pet.  She  was  aware  of 
Hugh's  pride  in  her,  and  basked  in  it. 

She  had,  too,  the  satisfaction  of  being  proud  of  him;  of 
observing  keenly  how  he  impressed  these  friends  of  hers.  She 
had  immensely  increased  her  prestige  among  them  by  marry 
ing  him — a  paradox,  perhaps,  since  most  of  them  professed  a 
deep  repugnance  to  the  institution  of  marriage,  as  well  as  a 
bitter  hatred  of  capitalists.  Logically,  the  marriage  of  one  of 
their  group  to  a  conspicuous  member  of  the  capitalist  class, 
might  well  seem  a  double  apostasy.  But  it  did  not  work  out 
that  way.  It  was  something  of  a  Roman  triumph  for  Helena, 
this  parade  through  the  ranks  of  the  New  York  radicals,  witU 
Hugh  in  the  role  of  captive  at  the  tail  of  her  chariot.  It  in 
spired  her  with  hope  of  another  conquest ;  the  conquest  of  his 
world,  back  in  Chicago. 

Even  the  new  clothes  she  was  buying  were  a  source  of  un 
expected  satisfaction  to  her.  The  sums  she  spent  on  them 
would  have  made  Anne  or  Constance  smile,  but  they  gave  her 
a  pleasurable  sense  of  reckless  extravagance.  And  Hugh's 
boyish  delight  in  the  effect  they  produced,  giving  her  beauty, 
for  the  first  time  in  her  life,  a  fair  chance,  kindled  a  new 
warmth  in  her  heart  for  him.  She  had  looked  forward  to 
their  marriage  with  honest  misgiving.  But  it  seemed,  just 
now,  that  the  great  adventure  to  which  she  had  always  re 
garded  herself  as  predestined,  was  beginning  auspiciously. 

She  wrote  with  immense  diligence  all  the  morning  and 
sometimes  on  into  the  afternoon,  getting  ahead  in  preparation 
for  those  first  weeks  in  Chicago  when  her  time  would  not  be 
so  completely  her  own. 

Hugh  never  could  get  over  wondering  at  the  ease  with  which 


196  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

she  did  it.  She  would  sit,  on  one  foot,  in  the  Morris  chair,  a 
little  portable  typewriter  he  had  given  her  in  her  lap,  and 
click  off  six  or  eight  pages  in  the  most  casual  manner,  in 
terrupting  herself,  half  a  dozen  times  an  hour,  to  read  him 
bits  she  was  particularly  pleased  with,  or  to  chat  with  him  for 
a  minute  or  two  about  anything  that  happened  to  occur  to  her. 

She  asked  him  on  one  of  those  mornings,  observing  that  he 
was  rather  at  a  loose  end,  why  he  didn't  write,  too,  and  his 
response  was  the  obvious  one  that  he  hadn't  anything  to  write. 

But  presently  he  did  sit  down  at  the  table,  pulled  up  a 
block  of  her  copy -paper,  got  out  his  fountain-pen,  and  drifted 
off  into  an  abstraction.  When,  at  the  end  of  her  own  stint, 
she  came  around  and  looked  over  his  shoulder,  the  page  he  had 
marked  "one,"  was  otherwise  completely  blank.  Siie  laughed, 
patted  his  head  admonitorily,  and  told  him  that  if  he  was  go 
ing  to  be  an  author,  he'd  have  to  do  better  than  that. 

But  he  stayed  in  that  afternoon  when  she  went  out  shopping, 
and  went  at  his  task  again.  He  kept  at  it,  in  fact,  for  three 
or  four  days,  and  he  excited  Helena's  curiosity  to  the  highest 
pitch,  and  her  resentment  a  little  besides,  though  she  pre 
tended  this  was  not  so,  by  refusing  to  let  her  read  what  he  was 
writing,  or  even  to  tell  her  what  he  was  writing  about.  He 
mollified  her,  though,  by  the  confession:  "I  had  to  promise 
myself  you  shouldn't  see,  in  order  to  get  going  at  all." 

What  it  had  occurred  to  him  to  do,  was  to  put  down,  in  plain 
words, — well,  what  he  thought  about  things.  There  had  been 
a  chemical  change  in  his  ideas  since  that  night  drive  back  to 
town  from  Riverdale  in  his  mother's  limousine,  when  the  rea 
gent  of  Helena's  story  had  been  applied  to  them.  The  precipi 
tate  hadn't  settled  yet.  Perhaps  filtration  through  the  medium 
of  black  words  on  white  paper,  would  accomplish  this  result. 
It  occurred  to  him  later,  that  in  case  he  succeeded  the  result 
would  have  an  objective  value  as  well  as  a  subjective  one. 
There  were  his  father  and  Greg  waiting  for  him,  not  knowing 
what  to  expect,  nor  what  mad  impracticalities  they  might 
have  to  combat,  He'd  always  found  trouble  in  talking  con 
secutively  to  either  of  them.  He  quarreled  with  Greg;  he 


EIVERDALE  197 

was  polite  to  his  father.  If  he  could  send,  on  ahead,  a  precis 
of  his  new  opinions,  it  might  save  a  lot  of  useless  beating 
of  the  air. 

The  person  his  mind  addressed,  however,  as  he  sat  there  at 
the  table,  whittling  out  his  paragraphs,  was  his  mother,  and 
it  was  in  the  form  of  a  letter  to  her  that  the  thing  finally  was 
written.  He  could  always  talk  to  her. 

"The  only  way  I  can  begin  "  he  began  to  write  at  last,  "is 
with  negatives.  I  am  not  a  socialist — not,  at  least,  if  a  social 
ist  is  what  I  believe  he  is.  A  socialist,  as  near  as  I  can  make 
out,  is  a  person  who  wants  to  abolish  property,  property  being 
whatever  is  mine  exclusively;  whatever  I  can  forbid  others 
the  enjoyment  of,  and  dispose  of  as  I  see  fit.  What  the  ortho 
dox  socialist  wants  is  to  put  all  that  into  the  hands  of  the 
State — lands,  mineral  resources,  transportation,  industries — 
everything.  He  wants  the  functions  of  the  State  expanded  to 
include,  with  what  they  exercise  already,  all  the  functions  now 
exercised  by  privately  owned  capital.  He  hopes  to  bring  that 
about  by  political  action;  by  electing  socialists  to  office;  by 
passing  socialist  laws,  all  directed  toward  that  one  accomplish 
ment.  ^Yhen  that  revolution  is  accomplished,  the  parasites  of 
capitalism  who,  without  doing  any  work  themselves  have  been 
riding  on  the  backs  of  the  real  producers  of  wealth,  will  be  de 
stroyed  and  the  wealth  they  have  appropriated  will  be  turned 
back,  through  the  State,  to  the  constituents  of  the  State,  who 
produced  it. 

"I  am  not  a  syndicalist,  either.  The  syndicalists  want  to 
abolish  property,  but  they  want  to  abolish  the  State  as  well. 
They  regard  the  ideal  State  of  the  socialist  with  abhorrence 
as  a  bureaucratic  tyranny  infinitely  worse  than  the  present 
capitalist-controlled  State  would  dare  to  be.  They  believe  in 
direct  action  rather  than  political  action,  because  in  all  politi 
cal  action  they  see  a  corrupting  force  which  destroys  its  aims, 
however  good  they  may  be.  The  direct  action  they  mean  to 
take  is  the  general  strike;  which  would  leave  the  workers  of 
each  industry  in  possession  of  complete  control  of  that  indus- 


198  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

try.  All  they  would  permit  in  the  way  of  a  general  organiza 
tion  afterward,  would  be  a  sort  of  loose  federation  with  con 
sultative  powers,  but  no  real  authority. 

"The  reason  why  I  am  neither  a  socialist  nor  a  syndicalist, 
is  that  I  do  not  believe,  yet — although  I  mean  to  keep  an  open 
mind  about  it — in  the  abolition  of  property.  I  do  not  believe 
that  property  can  be  abolished  as  long  as  people  generally,  re 
tain  a  possessive  sense — as  long  as  the  words  'mine'  and  'yours' 
mean  anything  to  them.  It  won't  do  any  good,  that  I  can 
see,  to  try  to  abolish  the  meaning  of  the  word  'yours'  until 
you  can  abolish  the  meaning  of  the  word  'mine/  And  as  long 
as  it's  in  human  nature  for  a  man  to  feel  that  it  adds  to  his 
importance— to  his  prestige — to  his  validity  as  a  person,  to 
see  things  that  are  his  around  him,  the  word  'mine'  will  go 
on  having  an  important  meaning.  It  seems  to  me  that  that 
possessive  sense  is  the  principal  actuating  force — the  main 
source  of  energy  of  the  whole  machine;  and  I  have  no  con 
fidence,  as  yet,  that  a  socialist,  or  a  syndicalist  machine  would 
run  any  better  without  it  than  this  one  would. 

"I  haven't  any  label,  then,  nor  any  groove  to  slide  down 
into.  I  must  feel  my  way  along  as  best  I  can.  The  point  I 
start  out  from  is  the  conviction  that  I  haven't  played  fair; 
that  the  cards  have  been  stacked  before  ever  the  game  began, 
in  my  favor.  And,  along  with  myself,  of  course,  I  include 
everybody  who  belongs,  roughly  speaking,  to  the  privileged 
class. 

"That  fact  has  been  under  my  eyes  for  a  long  time  and 
there  have  been  moments  when  I  have  come  near  enough  to 
seeing  it  to  worry  me.  But  I  never  should  have  seen  it,  I 
suppose,  without  this  look  I  have  had  lately,  at  the  other  side 
of  the  shield.  I  have  been  getting  acquainted  with  people  the 
cards  were  stacked  against,  who  have  won — something  any 
how — in  spite  of  that;  people  who,  but  for  the  possession  of 
extraordinary  talents  and  energies,  would  have  been  submerged 
altogether.  I  am  just  beginning  to  get  some  conception  of 
the  courage  it  takes,  the  resourcefulness  and  self-denial,  and 
the  amazing  plain  endurance,  to  get  one's  self  up  from  the 
depths  they  started  in,  to  a  decently  lighted  world. 


BIVEKDALE  199 

"I  have  been  seeing  myself,  lately,  as  I  and  my  class  must 
look  to  them.  It  makes  so  little  difference  whether  we're  any 
good  or  not.  We  float  along  at  the  top  all  the  same.  We 
have  no  excuse  for  not  being  immensely  better  than  they  are. 
All  the  apparatus  for  making  the  most  of  ourselves  is  put 
into  our  hands  from  the  beginning.  But  even  if  our  hands 
are  too  indolent  to  take  hold  of  it,  we're  carried  along  any 
how.  The  race  is  jockeyed  in  our  favor.  We  ourselves  are  the 
starters  and  the  judges. 

"I  take  my  own  case  again  for  an  example.  I  am  a  good 
metallurgist.  I  was  worth,  on  a  competitive  basis,  as  much 
salary  as  grandfather  paid  me  at  Youngstown.  But  before  I 
began  earning  that  salary,  I  had  had  enough  money  spent 
on  me  to  have  provided  a  pretty  good  educational  equipment 
for  a  dozen  men.  And  mine  was  taken  away  from  the  other 
eleren.  They  were  working  out  at  Eiverdale,  while  I  was  in 
school  and  college,  for  from  six  to  twelve  dollars  a  week. 
And  now  they're  striking  in  the  hope  of  getting  twenty-four. 
Besides  all  that,  I  had  the  tradition  of  success  to  push  me, 
and  the  assurance  of  an  opening  to  pull  me,  so  that  short  of 
being  utterly  worthless,  I  couldn't  have  failed.  And  if,  being 
utterly  worthless,  I  had  failed,  I'd  have  been  'taken  care  of 
anyhow.  Somebody  down  below  would  have  had  to  pay  my 
way — pull  my  oar  for  me. 

"So  it's  no  wonder,  seeing  me  like  that,  and  thousands  of 
others  like  me,  riding  along  on  the  top,  that  they  are  fighting 
mad;  that  they  rage  at  our  fatuous  complacence — at  our  silly 
Pharisaical  philanthropies;  that  they  hate  us  less  when  we're 
outspoken  in  our  intention  to  get  and  keep  all  we  can,  than 
when  we  talk  self-righteously,  as  the  Progressives  are  talking 
in  this  campaign,  about  passing  prosperity  around;  meaning 
thereby,  sending  out  the  crusts  and  bones,  when  we  have  done 
dining,  for  them  to  gnaw.  I  don't  wonder  that  they're  more 
concerned  to  tip  us  out  of  the  saddle  somehow,  and  let  mat 
ters  come  to  an  equilibrium  afterward  as  happens,  than  they 
are  in  building  up  an  Utopia  of  exquisitely  abstract  justice 
for  everybody,  ourselves  included,  that  can  be  put  into  effect 
without  pinching  anybody's  fingers.  They  aren't  in  a  mood 


200  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

to  care  if  some  of  us  get  hurt,  nor  to  reject  promising  looking 
methods  because  those  methods  don't  conform  to  our  alleged 
standards  of  fair  play.  What  do  they  know  about  fair  play? 
Have  we  ever  taught  it  to  them  ? 

"All  that  is  rather  emotional,,  I  suspect,  and  not  much  to 
the  point,  the  point  being,  so  far  as  I  am  concerned,  what  I  am 
going  to  do  about  it — I,  personally,  and  I  as  one  of  the  three 
trustees  of  Corbett  &  Company. 

"I  am  not  on  their  side — not  on  the  side,  that  is,  of  the 
real  radicals.  I  don't  believe  in  the  abolition  of  property 
except  as  it  gets  gradually  abolished  through  erosion  by  a 
newer  sort  of  social  ideas.  So  I  shall  not  advocate  the  sur 
render  of  our  ownership  of  Corbett  &  Company  to  our  opera 
tives,  nor  the  direction  of  it  to  a  committee  of  them. 

"What  I  would  like  to  surrender,  would  be  the  entire  labor 
management  into  their  own  hands.  What  I  would  like  to  see 
formed  is  a  strong  union,  embracing  the  whole  industry. 

"I  would  be  in  favor  of  our  insisting  that  every  wage- 
worker  in  the  plant  belonged  to  it.  I  would  like  to  see  it 
strong  enough  and  responsible  enough,  so  that  we  could  enter 
into  a  definite  contract  with  its  officers  for  furnishing  the 
entire  wage-working  man-power  of  our  establishment.  An  or 
ganization  like  that  should  have  in  its  hands  the  administra 
tion  of  what  goes  under  the  name  of  welfare  work ;  insurance, 
cooperative  buying,  and  so  on.  Our  entering  into  such  a  con 
tract  would  entail,  I  think,  the  admission  to  our  board  of  di 
rectors  of  representatives  of  the  union;  the  complete  accessi 
bility  of  our  books  to  them,  the  discussion  of  our  policies  with 
them,  and  the  reversion  to  them  of  a  certain  share  of  our 
profits. 

"On  the  other  hand,  it  would  of  course  be  essential  that 
the  union  should  be  a  responsible  organization  against  whom 
a  contract  could  be  enforced  in  the  courts  and  from  whom 
damages  could  be  collected. 

"What  I  seem  to  be  groping  toward  as  a  compromise  be 
tween  our  present  industrial  autocracy  and  the  revolutionary 
republicanism  of  the  syndicalists  is  a  sort  of  constitutional 


KIVERDALE 

monarch}'.  Once  it  got  established,  I  should  expect  the  grad 
ual  tendency  of  it  to  be  in  the  direction  of  limiting  and  wear 
ing  away  our  authority  and  ownership  and  the  building  up 
and  making  more  real  of  a  genuine  popular  control  of  the 
industry.  But  that  movement  would  be  gradual  and  in  step 
with  the  common  social  sense  of  the  nation." 

He  broke  his  promise  to  himself  when  he  had  got  as  far  as 
this,  and  showed  the  thing  to  Helena.  And  he  watched  her 
with  an  anxiety  that  was  only  half  humorous,  as  she  read  it. 
He  could  see  that  it  was  not  making  a  favorable  impression. 
She  smiled  occasionally  at  first — a  rather  patronizing  smile, 
as  a  school-mistress  might  over  the  naivete  of  a  bright  boy's 
composition.  But  the  smile  gave  way  to  an  angry  flush  at 
the  end. 

"That's  a  trick,"  she  said  hotly,  "and  an  old  trick,  at 
that.  ( — A  contract  enforcible  in  the  courts/  It's  not  worthy 
of  you.  But  it  won't  work.  Our  people  aren't  flies  to  walk 
into  that  spider-web.  They  know  who  writes  your  laws  and 
who  hires  your  judges,  and  they  won't  be  fooled." 

Hugh  sighed  and  did  not  attempt  to  answer  her.  That  sen 
sation  of  blankness  which  had  come  over  him  first  the  morn 
ing  when  she  flew  out  against  Jean  recurred,  and  not  for  the 
first  time  since  that  day.  It  always  did  recur  when  she  im 
puted  bad  faith  to  him.  It  wore  off,  though,  within  an  hour 
or  two. 

He  did  send  his  little  paper,  with  his  father's  name  instead 
of  his  mother's  at  the  top,  just  as  he  had  written  it. 

"This  isn't,  of  course,  an  ultimatum,"  he  concluded,  "nor 
even  a  program.  I  realize  that  the  working  out  of  any  such 
scheme  as  I  have  outlined  depends  more  upon  the  men  out 
there  at  Eiverdale,  and  on  you  and  Greg,  than  it  does  on  me. 

"I  am  not  an  impossibilist.  I  have  very  little  interest  in 
anything  that  won't  work,  and  I  hope  you'll  find,  when  it 
comes  to  dealing  with  one  fact  at  a  time  as  they  present  them 
selves  to  us,  that  I  will  be  reasonable.  It  is  with  the  idea  that 


202  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

it  will  enable  us  to  avoid  the  more  nagging  sort  of  personal 
arguments  that  I  am  asking  you  to  read  this  and  hand  it  on 
to  Greg;  also  to  mother,  if  you  don't  mind. 

"I  am  sorry  about  our  delay  in  coming  on.  It  has  seemed 
unavoidable.  I  promise  now  that  I,  at  least,  will  be  on  hand 
within  a  week. 

"Your  affectionate  son, 

"HUGH." 


CHAPTER  XVI 

IF  Price,  the  Corbetts'  butler,  had  been,  instead  of  a  real 
butler,  one  of  those  ironic  and  garrulous  philosophers  that 
Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  would  have  us  believe  they  are,  his  re 
port  of  the  dinner  in  the  big  house  the  night  Hugh  brought 
his  bride  home,  would  be  worth  having.  Perhaps  it  would 
anyway. 

It  was  an  occasion  they  had  all,  naturally  enough,  been 
dreading  for  days.  Not  so  much  that  Hugh — their  own 
familiar  Hugh — was  bringing  back  with  him,  for  domestica 
tion  at  their  hearth,  a  chimera — a  hippogrif — a  snaky-haired 
Medusa,,  as  that  this  violently  exogamous  act  of  his  threw  a 
doubt  on  his  being  their  own  familiar  Hugh.  If  he  had  gone 
off  to  Mecca  and  announced  his  conversion  to  Mohammedan 
ism,  they  could  hardly  have  awaited  his  return  with  deeper 
misgivings. 

None  of  them  acknowledged  this  feeling  to  any  of  the 
others;  it  was  too  much  an  affair  of  the  marrow  of  their 
bones  to  be  talked  about.  They  didn't  talk  much  about 
Helena,  either;  though  Carter,  at  the  breakfast  table  on  the 
morning  of  the  fatal  day,  started  something.  A  telegram 
had  just  come  in  from  Hugh  saying  what  train  they  were  on 
and  predicting  their  arrival  in  time  for  dinner. 

"Greg  had  better  go  to  the  station  to  meet  them,"  Carter 
observed.  "He's  the  only  one  ef  us  that  knows  her." 

That  startled  his  father  out  of  a  deep  preoccupation  and 
he  shot  at  his  eldest  son  the  question,  "Do  you  know  her  ?" 

"Oh,  Carter's  trying  to  be  funny,"  said  Greg  disgustedly. 
"I  saw  her  once.  You  knew  about  that.  Down  in  Baile/s 
office  the  day  the  strike  began,  when  he  told  her  she  was 
discharged  and  had  better  leave  town — and  she  made  an 
I.  W.  W.  speech  and  threatened  us  with  the  guillotine.  She 

203 


204  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

had  on  a  dirty  apron  then,  and  was  all  streaked  up  with  sweat 
and  coal  dust.  And  now,"  he  added  morosely,  "she's  my  sis 
ter-in-law  !  Will  I  be  expected  to  kiss  her  ?" 

"Oh,  well,"  said  Carter  sotto  voce,  "Hugh's  probably  washed 
her  by  now.  And  I  don't  suppose  she  always  bites." 

That  was  the  end  of  Carter,  for  his  father,  in  well-justified 
wrath,  obliterated  him.  "She  will  hardly,"  he  observed, 
"indulge  in  any  such  unspeakable  vulgarities  as  that." 

His  wife  could  see,  though,  that  this  was  a  mere  manner  of 
speaking.  There  were  no  vulgarities,  no  horrors,  that  he  put 
beyond  probability  as  attributes  of  his  daughter-in-law.  They 
all  had  a  nightmare  prevision  of  a  sprawling,  outrageous, 
grotesquely  clad,  shrill,  denunciatory  creature,  gesticulating 
over  the  dinner-table,  in  the  enforcement  of  the  polysyllabic 
jargon  of  anarchy;  and  of  a  horribly  translated  Hugh,  gazing 
an  infatuated  assent  to  it  all. 

By  the  time  they  were  fairly  seated  at  the  table,  they  all 
felt  like  rubbing  their  eyes  after  a  bad  dream.  The  incredible 
spectacle,  up  at  the  head  of  the  table — to  none  of  them  more 
amazing  than  to  the  participants  in  it — of  Helena  at  Mr. 
Corbett's  right  hand,  talking  pleasantly  about  the  weather 
and  the  accident  that  had  delayed  their  train ;  using,  if  warily, 
the  right  forks  and  never  breathing  fire  at  all,  left  them  all 
feeling,  in  the  light  of  their  anticipations,  limp  and  a  little 
ridiculous. 

I  don't  at  all  mean  to  say  that  the  evening  turned  out  to 
be  an  intrinsically  enjoyable  one,  or  even  comfortably  unem 
barrassed;  nor  that  the  ensuing  fortnight,  while  Hugh  and 
Helena  were  looking  out  a  house  and  settling  themselves 
into  it,  marked  the  beginning  of  affectionate  relations  between 
Hugh's  wife  and  his  family,  or  the  subsidence  of  their  pro 
found  regret  that  he  had  married  her.  The  relief  and  gratifi 
cation  they  all  felt  were  purely  superficial. 

It  does  not  do,  however,  to  underestimate  the  importance  of 
surfaces  when  you  are  dealing  with  a  crystalline  structure  like 
a  family.  It  was  something  for  the  Corbetts  to  discover  that 
Helena  if  she  was  not  quite  all  that  is  meant  by  the  word 
presentable,  was  equally  not  impossible. 


EIVERDALE  205 

And  it  meant  a  lot  to  Hugh  that,  coming  up  to  bed  that 
first  evening,  very  late,  after  a  long  talk  with  his  father 
and  Gregory,  he  should  find  Helena  neither  in  tears  of  humili 
ation  nor  in  a  tempest  of  rage ;  but,  on  the  contrary,  amiably 
inclined  to  a  cigarette  and  a  review  of  the  evening. 

"I  didn't  know  we  were  going  to  be  so  long,"  Hugh  said, 
referring  to  the  conference  in  the  library,  "but  I  felt  sure 
you'd  get  on  all  right  with  mother  and  Connie/' 

"Oh  yes,"  Helena  said  indifferently,  "we  got  oh  all  right, 
though  it  was  rather  dull." 

This  was  a  disappointment  to  Hugh,  since  Constance  and 
his  mother  were  the  two  members  of  the  family  he  had  felt 
surest  Helena  would  like.  Both  were  straightforward,  warm 
hearted,  open-minded  women,  and  he  didn't  see  what  more 
Helena  could  want  than  that. 

"I  can't  make  your  mother  out  exactly,"  she  said.  "What 
sort  of  person  was  she  when  your  father  married  her?  She 
was  one  of  the  people,  wasn't  she?" 

Hugh  laughed  a  big  laugh  at  that.  "She's  the  aristocrat  of 
the  bunch,"  he  said.  "She  had  a  great-aunt  who  never  got 
over  the  fact  that  a  grand-niece  of  hers  married  the  son  of 
a  man  who  worked  with  his  hands — as  grandfather  did.  He 
was  a  wheelwright,  you  know.  No,  if  mother  hasn't  any  man 
ners,  it's  because — well,  in  a  way,  she's  got  beyond  them." 

A  flush  of  annoyance  in  his  wife's  face  warned  him  away 
from  that  theme,  which  otherwise  he  would  have  found  it 
amusing  to  expand  upon.  He  could  see  how  it  was  well 
enough,  though.  His  mother  shocked  Helena.  Her  monu 
mental  disregard  of  many  of  the  first  principles  of  drawing- 
room  deportment,  might  well  enough  have  seemed  at  first  to 
Helena — self-consciously  on  her  own  very  best  behavior — sim 
ply  as  a  personal  affront,  a  calculated  method  of  exhibiting  dis 
regard.  And  even  the  correction  of  this  mistake  by  the  ob 
servation  that  she  treated  every  one  like  that,  would  not  make 
matters  much  better.  There  was  a  sort  of  swagger  about  that 
attitude,  Hugh  admitted. 

"But  how  about  Constance?"  he  asked. 

Connie's  manners,  of  course,  were  beyond  reproach  and,  in 


206  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

the  two  minutes  of  private  conversation  they  had  stolen  in  the 
drawing-room  after  dinner,  she  had  given  Hugh  a  reassurance, 
which  he  hardly  needed,  as  to  what  her  attitude  toward  her 
new  sister-in-law  was  going  to  be. 

"I  think  she's  lovely/'  Constance  had  said.  "Jean  was  right 
about  her  all  along.  I  hope  I  can  make  her  like  me.  Really, 
I  mean.  If  you  see  me  doing  anything  wrong,  you  must 
tell  me." 

So  it  was  with  genuine  astonishment  now  that  Hugh  dis 
covered  that  his  wife  regarded  Constance  as  haughty  and 
superior.  The  only  one  of  them,  she  said,  who  was  what  she 
had  expected  them  all  to  be. 

"You're  all  wrong  about  that,"  Hugh  protested.  "If  she 
seemed  like  that  it  was  only  because  she  was  trying  so 
hard  .  .  ." 

"Not  to,"  Helena  put  in. 

Hugh  had,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  pulled  up  on  the  brink  of 
that  very  phrase.  But  he  had  seen,  before  he  made  use  of  it. 
that  it  was  not  what  he  meant  exactly.  "Trying  so  hard  to 
make  friends,"  was  the  way  he  finally  finished  the  sentence. 

Helena's  little  laugh  of  dissent,  urged  him  on  to  quote — or 
paraphrase,  what  Constance  had  said  to  him  in  the  drawing- 
room. 

"Oh,  she  wants  to  make  up  with  you,"  said  Helena.  "That's 
plain  enough.  And  for  the  present,  she  thinks  that's  the  way 
to  do  it." 

That  left  him  without  a  reply. 

But  Helena,  of  her  own  accord,  went  on  in  a  pleasanter  vein. 
"Gregory  seemed  pleasant,  though  I  didn't  talk  to  him  much. 
And  Carter's  amusing.  But  the  one  I  really  like  is  your  father. 
He  was  lovely  to  me." 

Hugh  could  not  but  hare  been  amused  by  the  spectacle  at 
the  dinner  table  of  this  rapprochement.  Because  he  knew  how 
purely  an  affair  of  surfaces  it  was.  One  moment  of  contact 
between  his  wife's  real  opinions,  and  his  father's,  would  pro 
duce  an  explosion  that  would  destroy  it.  But  so  long  as  the 
surfaces  they  presented  to  each  other  fitted  together  so 
smoothly,  there  seemed  to  be  no  reason  why  that  contact  should 


EIVERDALE  207 

take  place.  His  father's  mannerliness  was,  naturally  enough 
you  could  see,  just  as  grateful  to  Helena  as  his  mother's  blunt 
ways  were  distressing.  She  pla}Ted  up  to  him — tried  to  reach 
his  level.  (Recalled  forgotten  and  once  despised  precepts  of 
Grace  Drummond's.)  By  doing  so,  she  kindled  in  Robert's 
heart  a  spark  of  genuine  liking  for  her.  He  saw  how  hard 
she  tried,  and  applauded  the  effort — found  it  admirable.  His 
little  acts  of  meticulous  gallantry  and  consideration  touched 
her  and  got  a  sympathetic  response  from  her.  (They  never, 
by  the  way,  had  got  just  this  response  from  any  of  his  own 
family.)  And  then,  of  course,  it  didn't  do  to  forget  that 
Helena  was  really  beautiful.  Beauty  in  women  was  a  thing 
Robert  was  always  susceptible  to. 

Hugh,  though  his  sense  of  the  humorous  aspect  of  this  at 
traction  was  irresistible,  still  felt  grateful  to  both  of  them  for 
it.  Down  in  the  library  his  father  had  made  what  apologetic 
amends  a  father  can  make  to  a  son,  for  the  injustice  he  felt 
he  had  done  him.  Their  quarrel,  as  a  quarrel,  was  buried. 

"You've  made  it  up  between  us,"  he  told  Helena  now. 
"There's  no  doubt  about  that,  after  what  he  said  about  you 
down  there  in  the  library.  I  wish  you  might  have  been  there 
to  hear." 

He  smoked  a  while  in  thoughtful  silence.  "You  know," 
he  said  at  last,  "I'm  awfully  sorry  for  father.  I  don't  believe 
I've  ever  understood  him  very  well;  seen  things  from  his 
point  of  view.  We're  all  a  heavy-handed  lot,  and  he's  sensi 
tive.  That  will  of  grandfather's  was  a  horribly  ruthless  sort 
of  thing,  and  it's  left  him — crushed.  It  seems  unfair  that  the 
opinions  and  prejudices  of  an  old  man  can  go  on  binding  after 
he's  dead.  Father's  attitude  toward  Greg  and  me  the  minute 
we  began  to  talk  business,  fairly  made  me  wince.  We've  each 
got  an  equal  authority  with  him,  of  course,  under  the  will. 
But,  all  the  same,  we're  just  his  two  boys. 

"And  then,  he's  all  broken  up,  too,  about  the  strike.  They're 
trying  to  settle  that — did  you  know  ?" 

"Who  are  ?"  Helena  wanted  to  know.  She  bit  down  a  yawn 
as  she  asked  the  question. 

The  governor,  Hugh  said,  had   appointed   a  conciliation 


208  AN   AMERICAN"   FAMILY 

board,  and  though  neither  side — none  of  the  three  sides,  to  put 
it  more  accurately,  for  it  was  a  triangular  affair  by  this  time — 
had  agreed  to  accept  its  findings,  it  was  holding  daily  hearings. 
So  far,  Hugh  gathered  from  his  father  and  Gregory,  the  ne 
gotiations  did  not  appear  very  promising. 

"It's  a  real  chance  for  me  to  do  something,  I  believe/'  he 
went  on  presently.  "It  means  working  like  a  dog,  of  course, 
just  getting  up  the  facts  to  begin  with.  They're  not  going  to 
stand  in  my  way — father  and  Greg,  I  mean.  Beally,  it's  won 
derful,  considering  how  wide  apart  our  opinions  are,  how  com 
fortably  we've  got  on  together  to-night.  Greg  and  I  haven't 
talked  as  much  and  quarreled  as  little  in  an  evening,  since  I 
can  remember.  I  suppose  it's  partly  relief  on  their  part,  in 
finding  me  reasonable. 

"Of  course,  I've  got  to  have  the  facts  before  I  can  give 
Greg  an  argument.  He's  full  of  them.  He  was  telling  me 
about  the  molders  to-night.  They  won't  come  back,  he  said, 
except  on  a  closed  shop  basis ;  which  means  that  we  can't  em 
ploy  or  discharge  anybody  without  their  consent.  Well,  there's 
no  harm  in  that,  if  they'll  give  us  men  who'll  deliver  a  com 
petent  day's  work  and  let  us  discharge  ones  who  won't.  But 
Greg  says  they  don't  mean  to  give  us  a  day's  work.  He  says 
their  limit  on  what  a  man  can  turn  out  on  a  molding  ma 
chine  is  only  a  little  more  than  what  he  could  do  by  hand — 
somewhere  from  a  third  to  a  fifth  of  what  he  could  do  easily 
with  the  machine.  If  that's  true — and  Greg  thinks  it  is,  of 
course — why,  it's  all  wrong." 

Helena's  only  comment  at  this  point  was  an  audible  yawn. 

"Oh,  I  know  it's  late,"  Hugh  said.  "We  can't  really  go  into 
it  to-night.  But  I'm  full  of  it  just  now.  It  seems  as  if  I 
had  a  chance  of  understanding  both  sides  and  bringing  them 
together.  Only,  I  need  your  help  in  the  thing.  There  are 
men  out  there — your  friends — that  I  want  to  work  with.  If 
you'll  persuade  them  that  I'm  not  an  enemy — not  a  benighted 
bigot  it's  no  use  talking  to  ...  You  will,  won't  you? 
You  can?  That's  not  what  you  think  I  am?" 

She  extinguished  her  cigarette  in  an  ash-tray  that  stood  on 
a  night  table,  smiled,  yawned  and  stretched  all  at  once,  and 


BIVERDALE  209 

then,,  without  dropping  her  arms,,  held  them  out  to  him.  He 
came  into  them  readily  enough. 

"You're  a  dear  anyway,"  she  said.  "Yes,,  I'll  do  what  I  can, 
of  course.  Come  along  to  bed."  Then,  a  little  more  brightly, 
"I've  changed  my  mind  about  how  we're  to  live.  I  don't  want 
a  hotel,  nor  an  apartment,  either.  I  want  a  house.  I  hadn't 
an  idea  how  nice  they  were." 

He  laughed.  "We  won't  run  to  a  house  like  this,"  he 
warned  her.  And  she  said  she  should  hope  not.  She  just 
wanted  something  with  stairs  in  it,  and  separate  rooms  for 
all  the  separate  things  one  wanted  to  do.  "And  a  bed  like 
this,"  she  specified.  "I  never  dreamed  there  was  such  a  thing 
in  the  world.  You'll  go  house-hunting  with  me  to-morrow, 
won't  you?  It's  too  crazily  absurd  that  I  should  be  living 
here." ' 

"It's  too  wonderful  that  you  should  be  living  here,"  said 
Hugh. 

She  made  no  reply  to  that  observation,  but  it  occurred  to 
her  to  wonder — it  was  a  very  vague  and  transient  wonder,  to 
be  sure — how  long  he'd  go  on  feeling  like  that. 


CHAPTER  XVII 

HUGH  and  Helena  managed,  rather  easily,  to  suit  them 
selves  with  a  house.    They  found  a  high-shouldered, 
rather  dignified  old  place  not  far  south  of  Chicago 
Avenue,  and  east  of  Bosh  Street,  which  gave  promise  of  meet 
ing  all  their  needs  pretty  adequately.    The  neighborhood  was 
accessible,  physically  at  least,  to  Hugh's  family  and  his  old 
friends,  so  that  their  going  into  it  lacked  anything  like  a  ges 
ture  of  repudiation.    At  the  same  time,  there  was  nothing 
about  it  to  discourage  Helena's  friends  from  the  belief  that 
she  remained,  in  spirit,  one  of  them. 

It  was  in  a  state  of  decent  repair,  and  they  made  no  at 
tempt  to  remodel  it,  beyond  tearing  out  a  partition  or  two  on 
the  top  floor  to  give  them  one  big  room,  which  Helena  called 
*  study. 

They  both  made  a  point,  rather  self-consciously,  of  wasting 
as  little  time  as  possible  over  the  selection  of  it;  and  over 
the  process  of  installing  themselves  there  they  were  even  more 

ci  I  -  1 . '    I  '_  5 

This  latter  part  of  the  job  was  left  entirely  in  Helena's 
bands,  since  is  soon  as  the  lease  was  signed,  Hugh  went  off  to 
Biverdale  and  pitched  in,  as  he  said,  to  the  strike.  She  went 
at  it,  much  as  she  went  at  the  business  of  writing  a  story,  with 
immense  iimiini^*^  and,  on  the  whole,  competency.  She  re 
jected,  without  eren  the  pretense  of  qualifying  regrets,  Con- 
of  assistance  here.  It  can  not  be  said  of  her  that 
in  advance  what  she  wanted,  but  she  had  what  served 
a  substitute  for  that  knowledge,  the  ability  to  make  an  al- 
ast  instantaneous  selection  amo^g  objects  offered  for  her 
and  to  regard  any  choice,  once  made,  as  final.  In  an 
time  «hp>  had  her  household  in  running  order. 
The  result  she  got  was  by  no  means  bad — certainly  nat 

210 


BIYEKDALE  211 

atrocious.  But  a  resemblance  might  have  been  detected  in  it 
to  her  literary  productions.  Done  in  complete  ignorance  of 
all  imaginative  niceties,  it  lacked,  just  as  ber  stories  did,  the 
mysterious  quality  of  atmosphere.  There  was  no  projection 
into  it  of  her  own  picturesque,  and,  in  some  aspects,  fascinat 
ing  personality. 

The  thing  that  surprised  and  distinctly  amused  Hugh  about 
it  all  was  Helena's  intense  practicality  when  it  came  to  spend 
ing  money.  There  were  a  hundred  cents  in  every  dollar,  re 
gardless  of  the  number  of  dollars  there  were,  and  every  one  of 
them  had  to  bring  in  all  that  it  was  worth.  That  he  was  not 
disposed  to  criticize  the  results  she  got,  does  not  argue,  neces 
sarily,  a  lack  of  sensitiveness  in  him  to  the  atmosphere  of  his 
surroundings.  A  house  of  his  own  was  as  new  a  thing  to  him 
as  it  was  to  Helena,  and  he  took  a  rather  boyish  pleasure  in  it. 
The  few  hours  he  spent  in  it,  after  long  and,  from  the  first, 
discouraging  days  out  at  Riverdale,  had  a  sort  of  holiday 
glamour  about  them. 

Riverdale  was  depressing.  The  strike  had  got  to  a  stage 
where  no  party  to  it  hoped  for  any  advantage.  It  was  kept  up 
simply  by  the  rancorous  determination  that  no  advantage 
should  be  conceded  to  any  one  else.  The  strings  all  sides  harped 
on  in  all  their  public  statements,  were  the  same  old  strings 
they  had  plucked  from  the  beginning.  But  the  notes  they  gave 
forth  were  frayed  and  flat. 

It  was.  as  Hugh  had  said,  a  three-cornered  fight.  The 
deepest  bitterness  it  had  engendered,  existed  between  two 
groups  of  the  strikers  themselves,  the  I.  W.  W.  element,  which 
had  begun  the  strike  and  had  been,  from  the  first  few  weeks,  in 
full  control  of  it.  and  the  trades-unionists,  who,  weak  at  first, 
had  been  gaining  strength  from  the  beginning.  The  fanatical 
all-or-nothing  policy,  which  the  syndicalist  creed  of  the  I.  W. 
W.  commits  it  to.  is,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  much  more  effective 
during  the  first  fortnight  of  a  strike  than  it  is  during  the  sec 
ond  and  third.  When  it  comes  to  settling  down  for  a  long 
pull,  to  organizing,  gathering  up  advantages  and  making  a 
good  trade,  the  old,  profoundly  experienced  Federation  learn 
the  radicals  nowhere.  They  had  got  to  work  at  once,  organix- 


212  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

ing  unorganized  trades,  and  stiffening  up  what  rudimentary 
organizations  they  found,  paving  the  way  to  the  parley,  the 
long  process  of  trade  and  compromise  which  they  knew  must 
eventually  come. 

To  the  industrial  unionist  the  fundamental  idea  of  a  trade 
union  is  aristocratic,  reactionary  and  abhorrent.  He  says — • 
and  with  a  certain  amount  of  truth — that  the  advantages 
which  these  skilled  workers  win  for  themselves  with  their 
closed-shop  agreements  and  limited  apprenticeships,  are  won, 
not  at  the  expense  of  the  common  enemy,  the  capitalist,  but 
at  the  expense  of  the  great  body  of  unskilled  labor  which 
can  not,  in  the  nature  of  things,  organize  itself  so  effectively 
and  is,  therefore,  robbed  like  Peter,  to  pay  Paul;  works  its 
endless  hours  and  pockets  its  pitiable  pay  to  make  up  for  the 
exactions  of  the  labor  aristocrats. 

The  sight,  then,  of  the  molders'  union  out  at  Rivcrdale, 
negotiating  a  separate  treaty  of  peace,  roused  a  furious  re 
sentment  among  the  radicals.  If  the  molders  went  back  and 
one  or  two  of  the  other  trades  followed  them,  the  strike  would 
be  broken  indeed. 

Hugh  agreed  with  Helena's  friends,  the  two  or  three  radical 
leaders  whom  he  prevailed  on  her  to  introduce  him  to,  in  re 
garding  this  outcome  as  wholly  unsatisfactory  and  little  better 
than  disastrous.  The  hours  he  spent  attending  the  hearings 
of  the  conciliation  board,  seemed  to  him  utterly  wasted.  The 
thing  was  nothing  but  a  horse  trade — a  game  of  haggle  and 
bluff,  a  series  of  compromises  with  this  union  and  that,  be 
tween  the  most  that  Gregory  could  be  induced  to  grant  and 
the  least  that  each  particular  trade  could  be  induced  to  accept 
— a  result  hardly  worth  working  for.  The  resultant  peace 
from  such  a  treaty  as  that  could  not  be  more  than  temporary. 
It  would  be  full  of  destructive  internal  strains,  injustices  and 
inequalities.  The  real  desideratum — a  decent  living  wage  to 
everybody,  and  a  decent  profit  over  the  top  for  the  company, 
the  modeling  of  the  whole  mass  while  it  was  still  plastic,  so 
that  in  cooling  and  hardening  it  should  not  break  down  any 
where,  was  as  far  out  of  Greg's  contemplation  as  it  was  out  of 
the  unionists'. 


BIVERDALE  213 

At  the  first  hearing  or  two  of  the  board  that  Hugh  attended 
lie  had  been  profoundly  impressed  by  Gregory's  ability.  It 
was  the  sort  of  situation  that  keyed  Greg  up  to  his  best,  and 
his  best  was  very  good  indeed.  He  was  amazingly  informed, 
instantly  ready,  and  in  addition,  he  was,  or  seemed  to  be, 
candid,  good-humored;  fairer,  more  conciliatory,  immensely 
more  open-minded  than  any  of  the  representatives  of  the 
strikers.  In  his  determined  fight  against  a  deliberate  limita 
tion  of  output  he  seemed  to  Hugh  demonstrably  right.  He 
found  it  hard  to  account  for  the  implacable  and  almost  de 
risive  hostility  with  which  the  piece-work  schedules,  which 
Gregory  offered  as  a  counter  proposition,  were  received. 

But  before  Hugh  had  spent  many  hours  analyzing  figures 
for  himself — raw  figures,  original  documents  such  as  old  cost 
sheets  and  pay-rolls,  he  perceived  that  his  brothers  compila 
tions  and  summaries  were  not  as  artless  as  they  purported  to 
be.  They  were  not  false  any  more  than  an  expert's  testimony 
on  the  stand,  in  answer  to  the  carefully  stated  hypothetical 
questions  of  the  side  that  has  retained  him,  is  false.  But  they 
were,  in  many  cases,  profoundly  misleading. 

"Well,"  Greg  said  with  a  wry  smile  when  Hugh  taxed  him 
with  it,  "you  have  a  real  eye  for  business  figures." 

This  was  in  his  office  at  the  plant  one  night — the  same  room 
that  had  witnessed  their  quarrel  on  that  memorable  evening  in 
May,  when  Hugh  had  rescued  Helena  from  Paddock's  kid 
napers. 

"I'll  confess/'  the  older  brother  went  on,  "that  I  have 
never  given  you  credit  for  it.  I  don't  believe  there's  a  man  in 
the  organization,  barring  Bailey,  who  could  have — got  the 
goods  on  me  like  that.  You're  perfectly  right  as  far  as  you 
go.  I  haven't  a  word  to  say/3 

"All  right,"  said  Hugh/  "Xow  tell  me  where  it  is  that  I 
don't  go.  What  is  there  beyond  where  I  stop  off?  What's 
your  idea  ?  You're  an  honest  man.  What  are  you  doing  with 
crooked  figures? — Well,  misleading  figures,  then.  In  a  sense 
they're  straight,  of  course." 

"Thanks  for  that,"  said  Greg  grimly.  "Why,  the  idea  is 
that  I  am  making  a  fight  for  oar  property.  I'm  sticking  to 


214  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

my  own  side  of  the  argument.  I'm  not  pretending  to  be  the 
umpire.  I'm  after,  in  so  many  words,  the  best  trade  I  can 
make.  Because  I  happen  to  know,  by  experience,  that  the  best 
I  can  get  won't  be  any  too  good.  We  operate,  when  all's  said, 
on  a  damn  narrow  margin  of  profit.  If  we  can't  show  a  profit, 
we're  out  of  business.  It's  a  question  of  what  the  traffic  will 
bear.  What  I  lose  in  one  place,  I've  got  to  make  up  somewhere 
else.  If  one  bunch  out  there  are  in  a  position  to  force  me 
to  pay  them  more  than  they're  worth,  I've  got  to  make  some 
other  bunch  take  less.  As,  a  matter  of  fact,  what  they're  worth, 
from  Bailey  down,  is  what  they  can  make  me  pay  for  what  I 
have  to  have.  That's  the  long  and  short  of  it." 

"What  I  am  trying  to  get  at,"  said  Hugh,  "is  that  the  busi 
ness  has  got  to  stand  the  payment  of  a  decent  living  wage  to 
every  operative  who  has  to  live  by  it.  If  it  won't,  in  this  de 
partment  or  that,  then  there's  something  fatally  wrong  some 
where;  either  in  the  labor  or  in  the  organization.  And  the 
responsibility  for  finding  where  it  is  wrong,  and  making  it 
right,  is  on  us.  That's  what  we're  here  for.  That's  all  that 
justifies  us  in  riding  along  comfortably  on  top.  If  we  aren't 
equal  to  the  job,  it's  time  they  tipped  us  out.  You  are  the 
umpire.  That's  my  view  of  the  thing." 

They  wrestled  over  this  difference  half  the  night.  But  it 
was  a  fundamental  one  and  they  were  as  far  apart  at  the  end 
as  at  the  beginning.  They  did  not  quarrel  in  their  wonted 
fashion  at  all.  Their  nearest  approach  to  it  was  when  Hugh 
asked  Greg,  apropos  of  the  question  of  higher  efficiency, 
whether  he  had  read  Taylor's  book  on  Scientific  Management. 

"Don't  talk  that  to  me,"  Greg  said  hotly.  "Talk  it  to  Hoi- 
den  and  Mapes."  These  were  the  representatives,  respectively, 
of  the  molders'  and  the  machinists'  unions.  "Or  to  Helena's 
friends,  Parkin  and  Jim  Lea.  See  how  they  take  it." 

"That's  about,"  Hugh  answered,  "what  it's  in  my  mind 
to  do." 

"You  mean,"  Greg  demanded  with  an  intent  look  at  him, 
"that  you're  thinking  of  'going  outside  the  fence'  again?" 
He  did  not  go  on  to  say  that  that  last  excursion  of  his 
brother  had  been  unhappy  enough  in  its  outcome  to  stand 


KIYEEDALE  215 

as  a  warning  against  another,  but  the  thought  vibrated  pal 
pably  in  the  air. 

But  after  a  rather  breathless  little  silence  they  took  up  the 
argument — once  more  impersonally,  and  they  managed  to  keep 
that  note  to  the  end. 

"I've  got  to  have  a  try  at  the  thing  on  my  own/'  Hugh 
said  as  they  parted.  "I  won't  embarrass  you  more  than  I  can 
help,  but  I  suppose  I  shall  more  or  less.  I  think  you're  half 
right — or  maybe  a  little  more.  And  I  think  you're  the  only 
man  in  sight  who's  got  the  ability  it  needs  to  swing  the  thing. 
That's  why  I've  been  trying  so  hard  to  get  you  to  see  that 
that  trust  of  grandfather's  involves  more  than  his  money." 
He  grinned  and  added,  "Though  perhaps  he  didn't  realize  that 
himself." 

"You  bet  he  didn't,"  said  Greg.  ""Well,  there's  no  use  chew 
ing  the  rag  any  longer,  I  suppose.  Good  night." 

Both  felt  something  ominous  in  the  friendliness  of  that 
parting.  It  showed  how  deep  the  difference  cut.  After  that, 
when  they  met  they  avoided  all  mention  of  the  business — 
chatted  pleasantly  about  safe  subjects,  family  trivialities — old 
times,  and  so  on.  And  they  separated  as  soon  as  they  com 
fortably  could.  Hugh  had  gone  outside  the  fence  indeed. 

Hugh  got  nowhere  at  all  with  Mapes  and  Holden.  One 
brief  and  rather  acrimonious  session  with  them  was  enough  to 
convince  him  that  there  was  no  thoroughfare  there.  They 
were  special  pleaders,  like  Gregory,  and  their  aim,  like  his, 
was  the  best  trade  they  could  get.  Both  were  clever,  without 
penetration.  They  challenged  Greg  confidently  at  his  own 
game,  and  it  was  hard  to  resist  the  feeling  that  if  they  were 
out-maneuvered,  they  deserved  what  they  got. 

With  the  other  two,  Parkin  and  James  Lea,  Hugh  found 
himself,  emotionally  at  least,  in  sympathy.  They  were  vaguely 
adumbrating  a  great  idea.  They  were  fumbling  with  the  lock, 
it  is  true.  But  it  was  the  right  door  they  were  trying  to  open. 

They  were  a  curiously  contrasted  pair.  Parkin,  small,  wiry, 
compact,  with  very  large,  bright  eyes,  a  jutting  nose  rather 
finely  modeled,  a  long  pointed  chin  and,  above  a  high  narrow 
brow,  a  head  of  fine,  wavy,  upstanding  hair,  was  an  out  and 


216  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY: 

out  fanatic.  There  was  a  strong  touch  of  mystical  asceticism 
about  him.  Given  a  different  environment  and  he  might  have 
been  a  very  High  Church  clergyman  in  a  slum  parish.  He'd 
have  made  an  admirable  model  for  an  artist  who  wanted  to 
paint  a  haloed  saint  in  the  manner  of  the  primitives. 

Lea  was  a  middle-aged,  and  not  very  prepossessing  man, 
committed  to  the  sort  of  a  large,  low  collar  that  goes  with  a 
thin  neck  and  an  Adam's  apple  of  great  prominence  and  mo 
bility.  His  countenance  was  habitually  solemn,  but  there  was 
a  fugitive  gleam  in  his  e}re  and  a  quirk  to  his  mouth — it  ex 
tended  itself  indeed  to  an  involuntary  occasional  twitch  of  the 
tip  of  his  nose — suggesting  that  if  one  could  get  at  what  he 
was  really  thinking  about  one  might  learn  something.  Hugh 
developed,  in  time,  a  genuine  liking  for  them  both. 

The  three  of  them,  with  Helena,  spent  hours — nights  almost 
— in  the  big,  half -furnished  room  up  at  the  top  of  Hugh's  new 
house,  threshing  matters  out.  They  smoked  and  talked,  ate 
sandwiches  and  talked,  drank — beer  or  coffee  at  preference- — 
and  talked,  around  and  round  interminably. 

Others  were  present,  too,  at  these  "conferences,"  but  they 
merely  formed  a  sort  of  fringe,  various  in  identity  and  never 
really  important. 

Parkin,  the  most  voluble  of  the  four,  never  really  argued; 
never  met  an  issue  or  controverted  a  statement.  He  did  not 
surmount  an  opposing  fact;  merely  used  it  as  a  point  of  de 
parture  for  a  tangential  flight  in  the  direction  of  infinity. 

Lea  liked  to  argue,  though  there  was  a  humorous  un- 
scrupulousness  in  his  choice  and  use  of  weapons. 

As  for  Helena,  she  preserved,  most  of  the  time,  a  curious 
aloofness  to  it  all,  as  of  one  listening  to  familiar  music,  though 
sometimes  she  swooped  superbly  to  the  rescue  of  one  or  the 
other  of  her  partisans — never  of  Hugh — and  when  she  did, 
she  combined  the  prowess  of  both :  Parkin's  flaming  zeal  and 
Lea's  resourcefulness. 

What  Hugh  pleaded  for — and  what  he  never  got — was  a 
constructive  program  that  would  meet  the  existing  case — a 
present,  immediate  aim,  which  could  conceivably  be  accom 
plished.  There  was  a  set  of  ascertained,  or  ascertainable,  facts 


BIVEHDALE 

to  be  dealt  with.  These  were  being  dealt  with  now  in  a  way 
they  all  agreed  was  wrong.  There  was  no  need  of  any  further 
proof  of  that.  The  thing  he  wanted  to  discover  wras  a  practi 
cal  way  of  dealing  with  them  that  was  right. 

"Oh,  there's  no  use  in  trying  to  get  together,  Corbett,"  Lea 
said  at  last  one  night,  "deciding  on  a  program  and  all  that. 
We  don't  want  the  same  thing.  There's  the  short  of  it.  You 
want  peace  and  we  want  war/' 

"War  for  its  own  sake?"  Hugh  demanded.  "Perpetual 
war?  "War  isn't  a  thing  you  can  live  on." 

"Put  it  at  this  then,"  said  Lea.  "That  you  want  peace  be 
fore  we've  fairly  begun  to  fight.  You  want  peace  that'll  leave 
you  in  possession.  You  want  a  peace  that'll  leave  you  your 
Packard,  widle  we're  still  tramping  through  the  mud.  Well, 
what  we  want's  a  Ford  for  everybody !  And  we  mean  to  fight 
until  we  get  it." 

"You  won't  get  it  by  fighting,"  said  Hugh.  "Because  it 
isn't  there  to  get.  Did  you  ever  take  the  trouble  to  look  up 
the  dividends  that  Corbett  &  Company  has  paid  in  the  last 
ten  years?  It's  averaged  just  over  eight  per  cent,  annually, 
on  a  five  million  dollar  capitalization.  That's  four  hundred 
thousand  dollars  a  year." 

"Well,  that  looks  pretty  good  to  me/'  said  Lea  with  a  grin. 

"Does  it?"  said  Hugh.  "Then  you're  weak  on  arithmetic. 
Divide  that  up  among  five  thousand  employees.  It  comes  to 
eighty  dollars  a  year.  That's  a  dollar  and  sixty  cents  a  week. 
That's  what  you'd  get  if  you  brought  off  your  revolution — 
turned  us  out  completely  and  took  over  the  business  your 
selves.  You'd  get  it,  that  is,  if  }rou  were  capable  of  running 
the  job  as  skilfully  and  efficiently  as  Greg  does.  And  that's 
what  some  people  would  probably  call  a  rash  presumption." 

"Of  course  you're  talking  nonsense,"  said  Helena,  uneasily 
• — the  other  two  men  were  simply  staring  from  each  other's 
faces  to  Hugh's.  "I  don't  see  just  where  the  catch  is, 
but  ..." 

"Why,  it's  in  that  little  word  dividends/*  said  Lea,  with  a 
sudden  return  of  assurance.  "Dividends  is  profits  they  don't 
take  the  trouble  to  hide.  It's  the  lamb  after  they've  done 


218  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

shearing  it.  There's  what  they  call  overhead  and  expense,  and 
depreciation,  and  God  knows  what  other  juggling  tricks." 

"And  fat  salaries,"  put  in  Helena.  "Bailey  with  his  twenty- 
four  thousand  a  year/' 

Lea  laughed  triumphantly.  "That'd  make  a  neat  little  ad 
dition  to  your  dollar  sixty  a  week,"  he  said. 

"Ten  cents,"  Hugh  told  him.  "Just  under  ten  cents,  on 
the  basis  of  an  even  five  thousand  employees." 

Parkin  had  been  getting  up  steam,  and  now  he  launched 
forth,  annihilating  Hugh's  pettifogging  trivialities  in  a  great 
gust  of  oratory.  There  were  just  two  bed-rock  facts :  natural 
resources,  coal,  wood,  iron  and  so  on,  which  belonged,  by 
rights,  to  all  mankind.  And  there  was  labor ;  the  toil  of  blood 
and  sweat  which  made  those  gifts  available  for  man.  The 
rest  was  all  lies  and  tricks. 

Hugh  listened  helplessly  until  the  gale  spent  itself.  Then 
he  said:  "I  wish  I  could  give  you  all  a  lesson  in  elementary 
bookkeeping.  All  our  books  are  for  is  to  enable  us  to  keep 
track  of  the  facts  so  that  we'll  know  how  much  we  dare  divide 
in  dividends.  I'd  hate  to  see  that  plant  after  you'd  run  it 
five  years  without  charging  off  overhead  and  depreciation.  And 
as  for  salaries — well,  if  we  couldn't  see  Bailey  saving  us  twice 
what  we  pay  him,  we'd  let  him  go.  You  people  don't  want  to 
look  at  the  facts.  That's  what's  the  matter  with  you." 

"The  matter  with  you  is,"  Parkin  said  angrily,  "that  you're 
a  capitalist  at  heart  as  well  as  in  fact.  You've  been  wearing 
your  sheepskin  very  prettily,  but  you've  shown  us  the  fangs 
and  the  claws  to-night." 

"I  suppose  that's  the  only  possible  line  to  take,"  said  Hugh, 
"when  you're  afraid  to  face  the  facts." 

"The  only  line  is  the  battle  line/'  said  Parkin,  and  the  other 
two  nodded  appreciatively  over  this  rejoinder.  "Our  first 
word  is  fight,  and  our  last  word  is  fight." 

"And  the  fact  is,"  said  Hugh,  "that  the  thing  you  talk 
about  fighting  for  isn't  there:  Personally,  you  don't  fight, 
you  know.  You  talk.  And  for  talking  purposes,  it  suits  you 
to  assume  that  there's  a  sort  of  rich  easy  paradise  that  you 
could  enjoy  if  you  could  just  break  into  it.  It's  a  fool's  para- 


RIVEEDALE  219 

dise.  That  dollar  and  sixty  cents  a  week  is  a  fact.  It  makes 
you  angry  because  it's  ridiculous.  It  isn't  big  enough  to  fight 
for,  and  if  you  did  fight  for  it,  it  would  disappear  altogether ; 
come  out  with  a  minus  sign  in  front  of  it.  The  only  way  to 
make  it  bigger  is  to  stop  fighting  and  cooperate.  Force  cap 
ital  to  cooperate  with  you.  Yes.  And  give  you  your  share. 
Yes." 

"Our  share,"  said  Parkin  furiously.  "Our  share  is  all 
there  is."  And,  as  he  got  up  to  go,  "I  feel  a  fool  for  having 
wasted  my  time  with  you." 

Between  Hugh  and  Helena,  after  the  others  had  gone,  the 
wrangle  protracted  itself  far  into  the  night. 

"Anyhow,"  she  said  to  him,  "by  your  own  admission,  you're 
stealing  a  dollar  and  sixty  cents  a  week  from  each  of  those 
slaves  of  yours." 

His  answer  was  that  he  admitted  nothing  of  the  sort. 
"Grandfather  put  his  life  into  that  business;  a  perfectly  ex 
traordinary  amount  of  energy  and  imagination.  And — well, 
something  that  was  more  than  that.  Honor,  if  you  like — de 
votion.  Any  sacrifice  that  it  demanded  of  him,  he  made. 
There  have  been  times,  any  number  of  them,  when  it  made 
him  sweat  blood  to  get  the  money  to  meet  his  pay-rolls.  Well, 
he  got  it,  and  he  met  them.  Would  a  squabbling  committee 
of  the  men  have  done  as  much  as  that?  N"ot  in  a  thousand 
years.  I'll  tell  you  what  that  dollar  and  sixty  cents  a  week 
is.  It's  insurance  that  they'll  get  the  rest." 

"Well,  there's  no  doubt  whose  side  you're  on  now,"  Helena 
said.  "Your  family'll  take  you  back  with  open  arms,  when 
they  hear  you  talk  like  that." 

It  may  be  admitted  that  Hugh  ought  to  have  read,  that 
night,  the  handwriting  on  the  wall.  It  would  have  saved  him 
a  very  bitter  experience — an  almost  embittering  experience, 
had  he  done  so.  But  his  fighting  blood  was  up.  He  had  got 
the  bit  in  his  teeth  again. 

He  shut  himself  up  for  a  week,  got  his  material  ready,  and 
wrote  a  series  of  what  he  called  speeches.  He  had  printed  a 
vast  quantity  of  leaflets.  He  placarded  the  town  of  Biverdale 
and  hired  the  only  sizable  hall  in  the  place,  for  four  evenings. 


220  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

And  there,  under  no  auspices  but  his  own,  on  a  stage  ungraced 
by  the  countenance  even  of  a  polite  chairman,  he  tried  to  force 
a  recognition  of  the  facts  which,  for  him,  made  up  the  truth. 

He  had  no  grandiose  hopes  of  a  sweeping  success.  But  if 
he  could  rally  a  party — even  a  small  one,  that  would  set  out 
marching  in  the  right  direction,  along  the  only  road  that  was 
a  thoroughfare,  he  would  have  felt  his  effort  well  repaid. 

But  the  thing  was  a  colossal  fiasco.  He  had  no  experience 
as  a  speaker,  and  no  innate  sense  of  oratorical  values.  All  ho 
had  to  recommend  him  beyond  the  bare  content  of  his  ideas, 
was  a  genuine  earnestness.  And  this,  a  bad  stage-manner 
went  a  long  way  to  disguise. 

Besides,  he  had  a  great  deal  too  much  to  say.  The  thing  he 
contemplated  offering  to  the  rough-and-ready  audience  out  at 
Riverdale,  amounted  to  an  attack  on  the  whole  system  of  cur 
rent  political  economy  and  the  sketching  in  outline  of  a 
new  one. 

For  the  first  two  nights  his  audience  packed  the  hall — an 
idly  curious,  mildly  derisive  audience  which  flared  up  every 
now  and  then  in  overt  hostility.  The  things  he  was  saying 
affronted  both  camps  of  strikers;  the  trades-unionists  and  the 
radicals,  about  equally.  And  while  one  side  booed  and  hissed, 
the  other  ironically  applauded.  The  next  moment,  perhaps, 
the  tables  would  be  turned.  It  was  only  when  he  ranged  his 
guns  upon  his  own  class — his  own  family,  as  with  complete 
candor,  he  sometimes  did — that  his  audience  united.  And 
even  then  they  mocked  as  at  one  who,  unwittingly,  was  giving 
himself  away. 

None  of  his  clan  was  present  in  the  hall.  But  reporters 
were,  from  most  of  the  city  papers.  It  was  a  capital  news 
story,  of  course,  that  one  of  the  Corbetts — the  wild  one,  who 
had  recently  married  the  anarchist's  daughter — had  run  amuck 
again.  There  was  no  deliberate  unfairness  in  their  selection, 
for  their  reports,  of  his  attacks  upon  his  class  and  tribe,  to  the 
exclusion  of  all  else.  It  was  simply  that  they  were  good  re 
porters.  Hugh  Corbett,  as  a  renegade,  was  news.  As  a  con 
structive  critic  of  the  program  of  labor,  he  was  not. 

\ 


E1VEEDALE  221 

By  the  third  night  the  novelty  of  the  thing  had  worn  off. 
The  hard  array  of  facts  was  getting  dull.  And  then,  besides, 
there  was  something  more  important  to  think  about.  The 
conciliation  board  had  made  its  report  that  day — a  report 
which  was  bitterly  resented,  especially  by  the  radical  wing  of 
the  strikers.  So  Hugh's  audience  that  night  only  half  filled 
the  hall.  It  yawned  and  stretched,  shuffled  its  feet,  and  be 
gan,  before  he  had  half  finished,  to  melt  away. 

It  was  the  next  morning — a  Saturday,  as  it  happened — that 
Gregory  published  a  total  rejection,  root  and  branch,  of  the 
recommendations  of  the  board. 

It  is  probable  that  if  he  had  waited,  every  one  of  the  strike 
committees  would  have  rejected  them  as  well,  and  the  onus 
of  the  rejection  might  thus  have  been  put  on  the  other  foot. 
But  Greg  was  a  Napoleonic  rather  than  a  Fabian  fighter. 

All  that  day  it  was  easy  to  see  that  there  was  a  storm  brew 
ing  in  Eiverdale.  Not  since  the  first  violent  week  of  the  strike 
had  the  mutterings  and  threats  been  so  loud. 

Hugh  began  speaking,  that  night,  to  an  audience  of  not  more 
than  a  hundred  persons :  a  few  crochetty  idealists  with  pana 
ceas  of  their  own,  a  few  old  people  who  liked  the  warmth  and 
the  bright  lights  of  the  hall,  a  sprinkling  of  sociologists  and 
settlement  workers;  hardly  one  genuine  striker  among  them. 
But  by  nine  o'clock,  it  having  begun  to  rain,  a  mob  came  surg 
ing  in  from  the  street,  not  a  frenzied  mob  at  all — not  actuated 
by  any  very  clear  idea ;  at  most,  by  an  ugly  impatience  that 
that  fool  was  still  spouting  in  there — that  rich  young  man  who 
didn't  know  his  luck  and,  for  some  unaccountable  reason,  saw 
fit  to  bite  the  hand  that  fed  him.  They  went  in  to  stop  his 
talk.  And  they  did. 

There  was  no  disposition  to  offer  him  violence.  Nobody 
tried  to  clamber  up  on  the  stage.  They  stood  there,  in  the 
aisles  and  on  the  seats,  and  howled  him  down.  When  he  saw 
that  that  was  their  intention,  that  they  meant  to  stay  there 
as  long  as  he  did,  and  wouldn't  hear  a  word,  he  put  his  papers 
in  his  pocket  and,  with  a  nod  and  a  rueful  smile,  which  they 
greeted  with  a  humorous  cheer,  acknowledged  his  defeat.  He 


223  ]       AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

showed  no  hesitation  about  coming  down  from  the  stage  right 
into  the  thick  of  them,  and  with  them — among  the  last  of  them 
— made  his  way  toward  the  door. 

Half  the  crowd,  perhaps,  had  got  out  of  the  hall,  when, 
simultaneously  with  the  boom  of  an  explosion,  the  building 
shook  and  a  good  deal  of  the  glass  in  the  windows  overlooking 
the  street — in  the  direction  of  the  one  exit,  that  is  to  say — fell 
with  a  crash.  The  confounding  suddenness  of  it,  together 
with  the  fact  that  danger  seemed  to  lie  in  the  direction  of  the 
doors,  produced  an  instant  of  spellbound  silence  before  the 
panic  could  break.  Hugh  was  quick  enough  to  take  advan 
tage  of  it. 

He  said,  casually  almost,  but  in  a  voice  that  easily  filled 
the  big  room,  "That's  not  this  building.  It's  in  the  plant 
across  the  street.  You're  perfectly  safe  if  you  go  out  quietly." 
Then  as  the  surge  of  excited  voices  began  welling  up  around 
him  and  showed  that  the  danger  of  a  stampede  was  not  quite 
passed,  he  shouted  a  joke. 

"Or  if  you  want  to  stay  in  here,"  he  said,  "I'll  finish  my 
speech !"  There  was  a  laugh,  a  fusillade  of  satirical  but  good- 
humored  replies,  and  the  crowd  made  its  way  safely  down  the 
stairs  and  out  of  the  building. 

Hugh's  guess  that  the  explosion  had  taken  place  in  the  plant 
was  verified  when  he  got  out  into  the  street,  by  the  crimson 
flames  which  were  already  leaping  up  from  one  of  the  build 
ings  inside  the  fence,  and  two  hundred  yards,  perhaps,  to  the 
westward.  The  paint-shop,  of  course!  There  was  a  high 
north  wind  with  a  little  fine  rain  in  it, — not  enough  to  amount 
to  anything,  but  the  direction  it  blew  from  meant  that  the 
town  was  safe. 

As  for  the  plant,  a  part  of  it  anyway — the  old  part — was 
certainly  doomed.  With  the  furious  start  the  fire  had  got 
from  the  intensely  inflammable  nature  of  the  material  it  began 
upon,  and  driven  before  a  wind  like  that,  it  would  be  irresist 
ible — would  burn  its  way  clean  across  until  it  was  stopped  by 
the  river.  None  of  the  more  modern  buildings,  however,  was 
in  that  track.  The  plant  had  expanded  westward.  What 
with  their  position  and  the  fact  that  they  were  built  supposedly 


RIVERDALE  223 

of  fire-proof  materials,  they  stood  a  good  chance  to  escape.  The 
building  to  make  the  fight  for  was  the  old  administration 
building,  which  stood  just  west  of  the  Charles  Street  gate; 
between  it  and  the  paint-shop.  All  the  offices  were  here;  all 
the  records.  By  a  fight  it  might  be  saved. 

All  that  went  through  Hugh's  mind  while  he  was  breaking 
through  the  crowd  in  the  street  and  making  his  way  down  to 
the  door  marked  "office,"  where  he  had  left  his  mother's  car, 
the  night  he  rescued  Helena. 

For  the  next  few  hours  he  was  nothing  but  one  of  the 
Corbetts. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

THE  man  who  set  off  the  bomb — it  took  six  months  of 
detective  work  to  bring  the  crime  home  to  him  and  get 
a  confession — proved  to  be  not  one  of  the  strikers  at  all, 
but  an  ex-employee  whose  dismissal  dated  back  three  or  four 
3Tears.     His  mind  had  perhaps  got  a  little  unbalanced  from 
long  harboring  of  a  grudge,  but  he  had  been  shrewd  enough 
to  see  that  the  strike  held  out  a  promise  of  immunity  from 
suspicion  for  all  except  the  strikers  themselves. 

So  far  as  immediate  results  went,  the  job  came  off  just  as 
he  had  planned  it,  and  one  can  fancy  him  drifting  along  with 
the  crowd  in  Charles  Street,  feeling  very  safe  from  detection, 
and  smiling  grimly  in  the  folds  of  an  upturned  ulster  collar, 
over  the  stupendous  harvest  of  havoc  his  hatred  would  reap. 
But  the  ultimate  results  confounded  his  calculations.  It 
turned  out  that  he  had  done  Corbett  &  Company  a  service. 
The  fire  swept  clean  an  area  of  about  forty  acres  that  had  been 
encumbered  by  old  buildings  unfitted  to  the  work  that  had  to 
be  done  in  them,  a  liability  rather  than  an  asset  in  that  the 
cost  of  their  insurance  ran  to  staggering  figures.  All  the  new 
buildings,  which — as  Hugh  had  supposed  they  would — escaped 
or  withstood  the  fire,  had  been  erected  in  accordance  with  a 
plan  which  involved  eventually  tearing  the  old  ones  down. 

It  was,  evidently,  a  statement  of  Robert  Corbett's  in  the 
newspapers  on  Monday  morning,  to  the  effect  that  the  losses 
were  fully  covered  by  insurance,  and  that  work  on  the  new 
buildings — whose  plans  already  were  drawn — would  begin  im 
mediately,  that  first  brought  this  consideration  to  the  mind  of 
the  criminal.  He  sent  an  anonymous  letter  to  the  Chicago 
chief  of  police,  hinting  that  since  the  fire  was  so  advantageous 
to  Corbett  &  Company,  it  would  be  well  to  investigate  the  pos 
sibility  of  their  having  set  it  themselves.  It  was  this  letter 
which  gave  the  investigators  the  first  of  the  clews  that  resulted 

224: 


RIVEKDALE  225 

finally  in  his  capture  and  Confession.  But  long  before  that 
happened  the  new  buildings  were  up  and  in  operation  and 
Gregory  had  a  plant  that  was,  in  every  detail,  the  last  word 
in  efficient  shop  engineering. 

Another  important  advantage  the  company  got  from  the 
fir'!  was  that  it  ended  the  strike.  The  temporary  necessity  of 
closing  down  the  whole  plant — a  necessity  none  could  dispute 
— resulted  in  a  change  of  feeling;  a  reaction,  not  logical  per 
haps,  but  certainly  psychological.  Everybody  had  had  enough. 
That  flaming  night  provided  a  needed  emotional  climax.  After 
that  it  was  time  to  turn  over  a  new  leaf.  Concessions  could 
be  made  without,  as  pidgin-English  has  it,  a  loss  of  face.  And 
everybody  made  them.  The  details  of  the  treaty  need  not  be 
reported  here. 

The  only  person  among  those  this  story  is  concerned  with, 
to  wrhom  the  fire  did  a  serious  disservice,  was  Hugh.  Preposter 
ously,  he  was  held  responsible  for  it. 

There  is  a  genuine  truth  in  the  apparently  frivolous  phrase, 
"If  I  say  it  three  times,  it's  so/5  It  is  the  fundamental  prin 
ciple  of  modern  advertising.  To  put  it  more  seriously,  it  is 
the  repeated  impression  that  remains. 

The  newspaper-reading  public  had  already  had  Hugh  pic 
tured  to  it  as  an  irresponsible  fanatic,  on  the  occasion  of  his 
marriage,  a  scant  two  months  before.  So,  when  the  papers 
took  him  up  again — told  how  he  was  preaching  socialism  and 
anarchy  (there  is  an  ineradicable  doubt  in  the  reportorial 
mind  as  to  which  is  which)  out  at  Riverdale,  denouncing  his 
own  family  as  oppressors  of  the  poor,  recklessly  rousing  the 
strikers  to  a  renewed  resistance  and  intensifying  their  ani 
mosity — already  bitter  enough  against  any  form,  however  mod 
erate,  of  capitalistic  control, — it  did  not  occur  to  anybody  to 
question  the  fairness  of  these  reports,  or  to  doubt  whether,  as 
a  matter  of  fact,  Hugh  had  done  these  things.  Of  course  he 
had  done  them  I  It  was  just  the  sort  of  thing  that  a  man 
capable  of  flying  off  and  marrying  an  anarchist,  would  do. 

Then,  on  top  of  it  all,  Hugh  was  the  victim  once  more,  of  a 
coincidence.  The  occurrence  of  the  bomb  outrage  and  the  fire, 


226  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY, 

on  the  very  night  of  the  last  of  his  speeches,  produced  the 
inference,  as  inevitable  as  it  was  unwarranted,  that  it  was  the 
speeches  which  had  incited  the  planting  of  the  bomh.  That 
young  fool  ought  to  be  forcibly  restrained.  If  his  family  were 
wise,  they'd  have  his  sanity  looked  into,  and  shut  him  up  in 
a  private  asylum  somewhere.  He'd  be  murdering  somebody 
the  next  thing  any  one  knew. 

In  the  family  the  feeling  was  deeper,  though  the  expression 
of  it,  of  course,  was  much  less  violent.  They  acquitted  Hugh 
of  any  inflammatory  intent  in  those  speeches  of  his.  And 
even,  after  they'd  cooled  down  a  bit,  of  any  direct  casual  con 
nection  with  the  fire.  Mrs.  Corbett  bluntly  told  Gregory  that 
his  own  rejection,  that  Saturday  morning,  of  the  findings  of 
the  conciliation  board,  had  more  to  do,  in  all  likelihood,  with 
the  planting  of  the  bomb,  than  any  of  Hugh's  vaporings. 

"I  don't  know  exactly  what  he  said,  of  course,"  she  admitted, 
"but  I  know,  in  a  general  way,  the  run  of  his  ideas,  and  there's 
nothing  about  them  to  set  the  world  on  fire.  Besides  it's  a 
safe  guess  that  his  talk  was  miles  over  their  heads.  He  says 
himself  that  they  were  bored  to  death  before  he  was  half  done." 

"Oh,  very  likely,"  Gregory  conceded.  "But  the  fact  remains 
that  for  him  to  hire  a  hall  out  there  and  try  to  talk  at  all, 
with  public  feeling  in  the  state  it  was  just  then,  was  simply 
idiotic. 

"He's  got  twice  my  brains,"  he  went  on  reflectively,  "but  the 
fact  is  he  can't  be  counted  on.  He's  proved  that  twice  now. 
In  a  good  many  ways  he's  the  best  of  the  lot.  I  know  grand 
father  thought  so.  But  he  does  things,  every  now  and  then, 
well — that  one  of  us  simply  can't  do." 

That,  finally,  was  the  family's  verdict.  It  was  possible  to 
go  on  being  fond  of  Hugh;  impossible,  indeed,  not  to.  And 
one  might  admire  him — his  talents,  his  capacities,  even  his 
Quixotic  altruism.  But  they  could  not  regard  him  any  longer 
as,  in  that  deep-lying  clan  sense,  one  of  them.  He  had,  in 
his  own  phrase,  gone  outside  the  fence  once  too  often. 

There  was  nothing  formal  about  the  verdict  of  course.  Ex 
cept  in  that  one  curt  phrase  Gregory  had  employed  in  the  talk 
with  his  mother,  just  reported,  it  was  never  expressed  in  words 


RIVERDALE  227 

at  all.  And  it  was  weeks  before  the  realization  of  it  finally 
came  home  to  Hugh. 

The  fire  nearly  cost  Robert  Corbett  his  life.  He  had  driven 
out  with  Gregory  in  the  rain,  late  that  Saturday  night,  in  re 
sponse  to  the  alarm  that  had  been  immediately  telephoned,  of 
course,  to  the  house.  They  drove  out  in  Gregory's  open  road 
ster  and  Robert  had  spent  the  rest  of  the  night,  and  a  good 
part  of  the  next  day,  on  the  scene.  The  fatigue  and  long  ex 
posure  proved  too  much  for  him.  He  caught  a  bad  cold,  neg 
lected  it  in  the  excitement  of  those  ensuing  days,  and  came 
down  with  a  furious  double  pneumonia  which  narrowly  missed 
killing  him. 

That  was,  of  course — and  most  unjustly — added  to  the  tale 
of  Hugh's  responsibilities.  If  any  human  agency  was  fairly 
chargeable  with  the  misfortune,  it  was  old  Gregory,  now  in  the 
grave.  No  profound  spiritual  shock,  such  as  the  revelation  in 
his  father's  will  had  been  to  Robert,  is  without  a  correspond 
ing  physical  reaction.  And  in  this  case,  the  reaction  had  been 
palpable.  Robert  Corbett  had  not  been  the  same  man  since 
the  day  after  his  father's  funeral ;  had  not  walked  so  straight, 
nor  breathed  so  deep.  The  man  he  had  been  would,  in  reason 
able  likelihood,  have  thrown  off  the  exhaustion  of  that  night  of 
the  fire,  just  as  his  sons  did. 

As  it  was,  he  pulled  through  and  surmounted  the  primary 
stages  of  convalescence  as  rapidly  as  the  doctor  hoped  he  woald. 
But  at  the  point  where,  dressed  and  able  to  be  about,  he  began 
attempting  a  normal  well  man's  routine  rather  than  an  inva 
lid's,  he  was  sharply  halted.  One  tentative  morning  at  the 
office,  though  Bemis  drove  him  out  and  back  most  tenderly 
in  a  closed  car,  proved  altogether  too  much  for  him. 

So  he  settled  down,  with  what  grace  he  could,  to  a  regimen 
tation  of  naps,  eggnogs  and  walks — if  the  day  was  fine — as  far 
as  the  park.  Sometimes  he  walked  south  instead  and  dropped 
in  on  Helena.  On  Helena  rather  than  on  Hugh,  because  Hugh 
was  seldom  at  home  in  the  middle  of  the  day.  His  wife  pro 
fessed  ignorance  of  his  exact  whereabouts. 

"I  think  he  goes  to  one  of  the  libraries,"  she  told  Robert, 
and  added,  after  a  pause,  "to  write." 


228  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

"To  write  1"  Robert  echoed.    "Do  you  mean  a  book  ?" 

Helena's  brows  puckered  ruefully.  "I  don't  know,"  she 
confessed.  "He  doesn't  talk  to  me  about  it." 

"Why  doesn't  he  write  at  home?"  Robert  wanted  to  know. 
"That's  what  that  study  of  yours  is  for,  isn't  it  ?" 

Helena  said  with  a  smile,  "I  think  it's  in  order  to  be  away 
from  home  part  of  the  time,  that  he's  writing  the  book." 

In  his  gallant,  mannerly  way,  Robert  ridiculed  this  conclu 
sion.  But  he  professed  himself  able  to  understand  how,  granted 
that  a  book  was  to  be  written,  or  any  other  sort  of  serious  work 
undertaken,  Helena's  husband  might  well  find  a  distraction 
at  home  that  it  was  prudent  and  even  necessary  to  flee  from. 
He  felt  sure  he  would  find  it  so  himself. 

Helena,  who  loved  this  sort  of  thing,  replied  appropriately, 
that  she  would  certainly  find  it  necessary  to  turn  Mm  out  of 
the  house  during  the  working  hours,  and  their  mild  little  flirta 
tion  moved  pleasantly  along  these  lines,  until  Robert  took 
his  leave.  But,  going,  he  said : 

"I'll  come  again  to-morrow,  if  I  may,  and  I  wish  you'd  tell 
Hugh  that  that  is  my  intention.  If  he  feels  that  he  can  neg 
lect  his  book  for  that  hour,  I  would  be  glad  to  see  him." 

Helena  suggested  as  an  improvement  on  the  plan,  that  he 
come  to  lunch,  and  promised  to  produce  Hugh  as  a  part  of 
the  feast.  "A  celebration  of  your  getting  well,"  she  said. 

A  shade  crossed  Robert's  face  at  that.  To  any  one  who  took, 
as  Robert  had  always  taken,  the  Corbett  physique  for  granted, 
his  present  state  of  semi-invalidism  was  a  source  of  real  hu 
miliation.  He  brightened  up  resolutely,  however,  and  told 
Helena  in  just  the  courtly  way  that  pleased  her,  that  he 
would  come. 

Hugh  came  to  lunch  next  day,  as  Helena  had  promised  he 
would,  and — what  she  had  been  far  less  confident  about — took 
his  part  very  pleasantly  in  the  talk;  lent  himself  to  the  vein 
of  it  with  a  light-heartedness  of  which  she  had  forgotten  he 
was  capable.  She  wished  he  might  be  a  little  more  like  that 
when  they  were  by  themselves.  That  curious  insensitiveness  of 
hers  saw,  heard,  felt  nothing  of  the  thing  that  underlay  the 
surface  gaiety;  the  nervous  tensity  not  far  from  fear  in  her. 


'RIVERDALE 

fatKer-m-law,  or  Her  husband's  melancholy.  She  was  sur 
prised  into  a  start  of  overt  displeasure  when  Hugh,  as  they 
finished  their  coffee,  said :  "I  think  father  wants  to  talk  with 
me.  Shall  he  and  I  go  into  the  library,  or  stay  here  ?" 

But  when  she  read  acquiescence  in  Robert's  more  regret 
fully  worded  phrases,  she  left  them  abruptly. 

There  was  rather  a  long  silence  after  she  had  gone.  The 
genuine  pity  Hugh  had  felt  for  his  father  ever  since  that  first 
night  after  their  return  from  New  York,  was  much  more  poig 
nant  to-day  than  it  had  been  before.  It  was  not  only  the  phy 
sical  weakness  that  he  saw,  though  that  alone  would  have  been 
pitiable  enough  and,  in  the  light  of  what  Hugh  had  expected 
from  Helena's  reports  of  him  to  find,  was  almost  shocking. 
But  the  other  thing  which  Hugh  had  felt  from  the  moment 
when  they  shook  hands ;  the  timidity — the  air  of  deprecation, 
of  a  sort  of  wistful  apology,  wrung  his  heart  and,  at  the  same 
time,  made  him  feel  warmly  indignant  at  the  two  Gregorys. 
It  was  they  who  had  done  this  thing,  between  them. 

But  these  were  feelings  which  it  was  impossible  for  Hugh 
to  express.  They  would  be  difficult,  I  suppose,  for  any  son 
to  express  to  a  father.  They  are  no  part  of  the  conventional 
filial  attitude. 

It  was  Robert  wKo  presently  broke  the  silence  with  a  re 
mark — palpably  not  connected  with  the  subject  he  had  come 
to  talk  with  Hugh  about, — concerning  Hugh's  book.  Helena 
had  said  he  was  engaged  in  the  writing  of  one. 

"I  doubt  if  it  ever  turns  out  to  be  a  book,"  Hugh  said.  "I 
read  more  than  I  write,  and  I  unlearn  more  than  I  learn,  I 
guess.  Like  the  frog  jumping  out  of  the  well." 

"You're  fortunate,"  Robert  said,  "in  being  able  to  do  your 
unlearning  early  in  life — before  it  is  too  late  to  begin. 

'There  is  much,"  he  went  on,  "that  I'd  be  glad  to  unlearn. 
But  I  only  made  that  discovery  simultaneously  with  the  one 
that  I  am  an  old  man." 

"Old !"  said  Hugh.    "You're  not  sixty." 

"It  is  not  a  matter  of  years,  I  think,"  said  Robert.  "My 
father  was  never  old  in  the  sense  I  mean." 

"It's  not  age  with  you,"  Hugh  said  bluntly,  "it's  illness. 


230  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

You're  much  farther  from  well  than  I  had  any  notion  of. 
You're  hardly  any  stronger,  if  at  all,  than  the  last  time  I 
saw  you." 

"It  is  a  slow  process,  I  suppose,"  said  Robert. 

"It  needn't  be  as  slow  as  this.  Shouldn't  be,  either."  Then, 
as  the  idea  occurred  to  him,  he  went  on.  "Why  don't  3rou  go 
away?  This  is  an  infernal  climate  for  an  invalid  to  wrestle 
with.  Why  don't  you  and  mother  go  to  Santa  Barbara  for 
the  winter  ?  I  don't  see  why  no  one  thought  of  that  before." 

"That  .  .  ."  said  Robert,  and  paused.  Hugh  noted 
with  astonishment,  that  his  father's  hand  was  shaking. 

"That,"  Robert  began  again,  "is  what  I  have  come  to  speak 
to  you  about.  Doctor  Darby  says  it  would  be  advisable,  and 
your  mother  is  anxious  that  we  start  at  once.  Before  the 
weather  gets  any  worse." 

"Of  course,"  said  Hugh.    "Why  not?" 

"Gregory  feels,"  said  Robert,  " — we — we  both  feel,  that  in 
certain  contingencies,  it  might  be  necessary  that  I  be  here. 
In  default,  that  is,  of  an  arrangement  that  might  be 
made  ..." 

At  that  the  light  broke  over  Hugh.  His  father  saw  the 
puzzled  look  in  his  face  give  way  to  a  sudden  flush  and  stare 
of  comprehension. 

"You  want  me  to  resign  from  the  trust?"  said  Hugh.  "So 
that  with  you  away  there'd  be  no  danger  of  my  interference? 
But  can  I  do  that  without  going  to  the  courts  ? — Or  was  that 
the  idea?" 

He  was  almost  inarticulate  from  the  effort  he  had  to  make 
to  keep  the  note  of  anger  out  of  his  voice. 

No  such  drastic  action  as  that,  Robert  hastily  assured  him, 
was  necessary,  or  had  been  in  contemplation  for  a  moment. 
Only,  with  himself  away,  unable  to  cast  a  deciding  vote  on 
any  question  that  might  arise,  unable  so  the  medical  verdict 
was,  to  take,  for  many  months,  an  active  part  even  in  the  con 
sideration  of  matters  of  business  policy,  it  had  seemed  to 
Gregory — and  to  himself  as  well,  Robert  loyally  added — that 
some  embarrassing,  and  possibly  disastrous  situations  might 
arise  from  the  fact  that  the  two  remaining  trustees  possessed 


RIVERDALE  231 

an  equal  authority.  If  Hugh  would  be  willing,  for  the  present, 
to  waive  his  legal  right  to  interfere — in  a  word,  to  recognize 
his  brother's  authority  as  paramount — Robert  could  go  away 
with  a  quiet  mind. 

"I'll  write  Greg  a  note  to  that  effect,  of  course/'  said  Hugh 
hastily.  "Or  if  he  prefers  to  draft  it  himself,  I'll  sign  it." 

"My  boy !"  Robert  Corbett  cried ;  and  a  more  poignant  feel 
ing  found  expression  in  that  pair  of  words  than  Hugh  had 
ever  heard  from  his  lips  before.  "Your  word  is  all  we  want. 
It  is  not  your  honor  that  we  are  in  doubt  about.3' 

The  sight  of  tears  in  his  father's  eyes  stung  Hugh  to  a 
sharp  resumption  of  self-command.  He  said,  in  a  voice  that 
sounded  about  as  he  meant  it  to : 

"I  can't  blame  you  for  doubting  pretty  much  everything  else 
about  me.  I  hadn't  any  idea  of  harassing  Greg.  But  it's  no 
wonder  he  didn't  want  to  be  left  to  my  mercies."  Then,  in 
spite  of  himself,  his  tone  took  on  an  edge.  "All  that  I  don't 
see  is  why  Greg  put  the  job  of — belling  the  cat — up  to  you." 

"It  was  his  idea  to  speak  to  you  himself,"  Eobert  explained. 
"I  insisted  that  it  be  left  to  me." 

Hugh  nodded,  and  presently  got  himself  going  upon  the 
theme  of  the  wonderful  climate  of  southern  California  and 
the  benefits  his  father  would  derive  from  it.  He  hadn't  much 
idea  of  what  he  was  saying,  and  it  is  doubtful  if  his  father 
had.  All  that  mattered  to  either  of  them  was  that  the  talk 
should  be  kept  going,  somehow,  until  the  car  should  come 
to  take  the  invalid  home. 

"What  was  it  all  about?"  Helena  asked  when  Robert  had 
gone. 

She  had  been  waiting  in  the  hall  to  bid  her  father-in-law 
good-by,  as  a  dutiful  hostess  should.  Her  question  was  natural 
enough,  too,  as  Hugh  admitted  while  he  resented  it.  He  had 
hoped  to  escape  Helena  altogether;  to  get  away  by  himself. 
He  must  get  away  by  himself,  where  he  could  relax  that  iron 
grip  he  had  been  keeping,  on  thought  as  well  as  on  word,  ever 
since  his  father  had  voiced  the  family's  decree  of  exile  (that 
was  what  it  came  to)  upon  him. 

In  Helena's  presence,  under  her  intently  regarding  eyes, 


232  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

the  need  for  that  unrelaxed  grip  was  greater  than  ever.  He 
did  not  trouble  to  ask  himself  why  this  was  so.  It  was  already 
clearer  than  any  reasoning  process  could  make  it,  that  it  would 
be  intolerable  that  his  wife  should  even  suspect  the  nature  of 
that  fiat  of  Gregory's.  (It  was  Gregory's,  of  course,  though 
the  others  had  concurred  in  it.)  Just  as  intolerable  as  that 
the  family  should  discover — his  other  secret. 

"Didn't  you  hear  what  I  said  just  now?"  his  wife's  voice 
broke  in  upon  him.  "You've  stood  there  staring  for  five  min 
utes.  What  was  the  wonderful  secret?" 

"Secret!"  he  echoed.  Her  picking  up — like  that — of  the 
word  that  had  been  in  his  own  thoughts,  startled  him. 

"The  secret,"  she  explained  in  open  mockery,  "that  I  had 
to  be  turned  out  of  the  room  for  you  two  to  talk  about." 

He  got  himself  together.  "I'm  sorry  it  seemed  like  turning 
you  out.  It  was  only  that  they've  decided  that  father  ought 
to  go  away.  For  the  winter.  To  southern  California.  He 
isn't  getting  well  as  fast  as  he  should.  He  wanted  to  talk  with 
me  about  it." 

She  laughed,  angrily — and  it  may  be  conceded  that  her  an- 
noyance  was  pardonable.  "If  you  can't  tell  better  lies  than 
that  }rou'd  better  not  lie  at  all." 

"It  happens  not  to  be  a  lie,"  Hugh  told  her.  Then  he 
roused  himself  to  improving  the  plausibility  of  it.  "There 
are  things  that  have  got  to  be  decided  about  the  estate  before 
he  goes.  That  was  what  we  talked  about.  Particularly, 
father  wanted  to  be  sure  that  my  views  coincided  with  Greg's 
about  the  possibility  of  his  going  at  all.  As  soon  as  I'd  assured 
him  they  did,  we  fell  back  on  the  climate  and  sea-bathing  and 
orange-grove — that  sort  of  thing." 

Then,  with  a  look  at  his  watch, — "I'd  like  to  get  another 
couple  of  hours  at  the  library.  .  ." 

"Don't  go !"  she  commanded  shortly.  "I've  got  something 
to  say  myself,  and  it  may  as  well  be  now." 

She  led  the  way  into  their  drawing-room  and,  as  he  fol 
lowed,  said:  "I  wish  you'd  sit  down."  She  did  not  herself, 
however ;  but  walked  across  to  the  little  white  marble  mantel 
piece  and  took  her  station  there  instead. 


KIVERDALE  233 

It  always  irritated  her,  he  had  noted,  to  have  to  talk  to  him 
when  they  were  both  standing.  His  great  height  deprived  her 
of  an  advantage  she  did  not  like  to  do  without.  Her  only  way 
of  neutralizing  it,  when  he  insisted  on  remaining  upon  his 
feet,  was  by  herself  lying  out  on  something.  But  there  was 
no  couch  in  the  drawing-room. 

"I  won't  go  on  like  this,  Hugh,"  she  said  when  she  was 
ready.  There  was  a  kind  of  dangerous  quiet  about  her  as  she 
gtood  there  looking  down  at  him.  This  was  not  going  to  be 
merely  one  of  their  routine  quarrels.  A  realization  of  that 
kept  him  from  speaking  when  her  pause  gave  him  a  chance 
to  do  so. 

"You're  entitled  to  ask  'Like  what  ?' "  she  went  on.  "You 
know.  But  I  don't  mind  telling  you.  You've  been  perfectly 
nice  and  polite.  There's  nothing  I  could  go  into  your  rotten 
divorce  courts  with.  You're  treating  me  in  a  way  that  would 
be  perfectly  satisfactory  I  suppose,  to  .  .  ." 

His  eyes  met  hers  and  she  hesitated;  afraid,  the  literal 
truth  was,  to  gay  the* name  that  was  on  her  lips. 

"...  to  any  of  the  girls  of  your  own  sort  who'd  have 
been  glad  enough  to  marry  you.  But  I  won't  go  on  living  with 
a  man — half  living  with  him — who  makes  me  feel  as  if  I  was 
something  he  was  saddled  with.  You've  kept  it  up  long 
enough.  Ever  since  the  morning  after  the  fire  out  at  River- 
dale.  If  it's  just  that  you're  angry  over  the  things  I  said 
then,  why  it's  time  you  got  over  it.  Beat  me,  if  you  like. 
You  ought  to  have  done  it  then,  if  you  felt  like  that.  But 
then  get  over  it. 

''If  you're  not  angry  about  that  any  more,  and  if  there's 
nothing  else  that  you  have  got  angry  about  since — something 
that  I  don't  know  about — if  it's  just  that  you're  sick  of  your 
bargain ;  that  you  don't  like  me — don't  like  to  see  me  or  hear 
me  talk,  or — put  your  hands  on  me,  why  you  can  say  so  and 
let  that  be  the  end  of  it.  I've  done  all  I  know  to  make  up 
for  that  morning." 

She  waited  until  he  should  speak;  and  it  was  plain  to  him 
that  he  must  speak  quickly  lest  the  silence  should  answer  for 
him.  He  must  say  the  ri^ht  thing,  too.  A  good  many  seconds 


234  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

were  recorded  by  the  glass-domed  anniversary  clock  whose  re 
volving  pendulum  swung  so  lazily,  before  he  found  his  voice. 

She  was  almost  altogether  right;  that  was  the  plain  truth. 
Certainly  right  in  her  complaint.  Right  in  saying  that  his 
anger — if  it  was  anger — had  had  time  to  cool.  But  was  she 
right  in  her  surmise  that  all  desire  for  her  was  dead  in  him  ? 
Partly.  It  was  a  queer  thing  that  had  happened  to  him  on 
that  morning  she  had  referred  to.  Something  had  gone  snap 
like  a  frayed  violin  string,  and  would  not,  he  thought,  ever 
be  played  upon  again. 

There  had  been  nothing  much  about  that  quarrel  of  theirs 
to  establish  it  as  a  different  thing — put  it  in  a  different  species 
— from  those  they  had  had  so  many  of  and  had  so  easily  for 
gotten. 

He  had  come  in,  wet,  smoke-blackened,  pretty  well  tired  out 
after  the  fight  they  had  had  to  make  to  save  their  office  build 
ing  from  the  flames. ,  He  was  tired  in  spirit,  too ;  and  with 
reason  enough.  In  a  mood,  if  ever  he  had  been,  that  wanted 
understanding  and  gentleness  and  comfort  and  security,  to 
come  home  to. 

But  what  he  had  found  at  home  was  very  different.  Helena, 
with  a  disposition  to  irony — -a  note  she  never  managed  very 
well.  She  had  had  a  night  of  it  too. 

She  had  finished  a  short  story  in  the  middle  of  the  evening, 
and  was  waiting  up  for  Hugh's  return  from  Riverdale  in 
order  to  read  it  to  him.  About  eleven  o'clock  came  a  telephone 
message,  not  in  Hugh's  voice,  but  relayed  under  his  instruc 
tions,  that  the  plant  was  afire. 

With  a  little  more  energy,  she  would  have  dressed  and  gone 
out  to  Riverdale  herself.  For  it  was  exactly  her  sort  of  thing 
— spectacular,  terrifying,  destructive.  She  liked  to  fancy  her 
self  haranguing  a  crowd,  lit  by  the  glare  of  it.  She  made 
them  a  wonderful  speech.  She  saw  their  massed  faces;  heard 
their  cheers — glowed,  throbbed,  quivered  with  it  all. 

(But  while  her  spirit  was  indulging  in  these  flights,  her 
silk-clad  body  was  reclining  among  the  cushions  of  the  chaise 
longue  in  a  fire-lit  room,  her  only  physical  reminder  of  the 


EIVERDALE  235 

tempestuous  world,  the  squalls  of  rain  that  audibly  lashed  the 
windows.) 

About  two  o'clock  she  got  another  telephone  message;  this 
from  her  mother-in-law.  Since  the  message  had  been  sent 
under  Hugh's  instructions,  Mrs.  Corbett  had  assumed  that  it 
was  meant  for  Helena,  and  called  her  up.  Hugh  was  not  to 
be  expected  home  that  night.  The  fire  was  being  dealt  with 
as  successfully  as  one  could  hope. 

It  was  natural  that  Helena  should  have  taken  this  occasion 
to  express  the  proper  regret  concerning  the  disaster ;  natural, 
too,  that  the  sincerity  of  it  should  have  sounded,  even  over  the 
telephone,  rather  dubious.  It  was  also  natural  that  Mrs. 
Corbett,  who  had  been  getting  half-hourly  bulletins  from  Kiv- 
erdale  since  midnight,  and  was  fully  capable  of  figuring  out 
for  herself  the  advantageous  aspect  to  Corbett  &  Company  of 
the  attempted  injury,  should  have  communicated  these  con 
siderations  to  Helena.  It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  she 
rubbed  them  in  with  a  gusto  that  far  outran  discretion.  Noth 
ing  was  afire,  or  going  to  take  fire,  that  wouldn't  in  the  course 
of  the  next  year  or  two  have  had  to  be  torn  down  anyhow. 
What  it  boiled  down  to  was  the  greatest  piece  of  luck  that  had 
befallen  Corbett  &  Company  in  many  a  long  day.  She  did  not 
go  the  length  of  saying  that  Helena's  anarchists  would  need 
to  be  a  lot  wiser  before  they  could  hope  to  make  an  effective 
war  upon  society,  but  this  implication  was  vibrant  in  what  she 
did  say. 

Helena  did  not  go  back  to  her  long  chair  after  that.  She 
spent  the  rest  of  the  night,  or  most  of  it,  pacing  and  prowling 
about  her  pretty  room,  like  one  of  the  big  cats  her  movements 
so  often  reminded  people  of.  And  when  she  finally  went  to 
bed,  it  was  not  to  sleep. 

Her  process  of  reasoning  was  precisely  that  which  the  crim 
inal  afterward  tried  to  impress  upon  the  chief  of  police. 
Since  the  thing  turned  out  so  advantageously  to  the  Corbetts, 
they — Gregory  that  is  to  say — must  have  done  it.  Of  course 
he  had  done  it !  Why  had  she  been  such  a  fool  as  not  to  have 
seen  it  from  the  first?  It  was  what  these  contemptible  capi- 


336  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

talistg  were  always  doing  when  strikes  gave  them  the  slightest 
excuse. 

And  the  thought  of  Hugh  out  there,  risking  his  life,  per 
haps,  to  check  the  conflagration  his  brother  had  let  loose,  gave 
her  a  sensation  of  contemptuous  pity.  That  was  the  mood  in 
which  she  received  him  about  ten  o'clock  Sunday  morning. 

"Of  course/'  she  said  to  him  when  he  told  her  how  little 
damage,  except  to  the  strikers  themselves,  the  fire  had  done. 
"You  could  trust  Gregory  to  see  to  that."  And  when,  with  a 
etare,  he  asked  her  what  she  meant,  she  told  him  in  words  of 
one  syllable. 

It  was  not  until  he  refused  to  hear  her  arguments,  that  she 
grew  angry.  Then  she  whipped  up  one  of  her  familiar  tem 
pests. 

"I'll  give  you  my  personal  guarantee,"  he  said  finally,  "that 
Greg  had  nothing  to  do  with  it  He's  exactly  as  incapable  of 
that  as  I  would  be." 

"Well,"  eho  said  then,  "how  do  I  know  that  you  weren't  in 
it  too?  Perhaps  it  was  your  brother's  idea  that  you  should 
hire  a  hall  and  make  those  speeches  and  try  to  get  them  angry 
enough  so  that  it  would  seem  likely  they'd  do  such  a  thing." 

It  was  then  that  the  string  snapped.  He  realized,  of  course, 
that  this  last  was  not  a  serious  accusation; — was  simply  a 
stroke  of  the  claw,  meant  to  tear  anything  that  could  be  torn. 
His  anger  suddenly  left  him.  He  sat  back  a  little  more  com 
fortably  in  his  chair  and  looked  at  her;  saw  her  now  with  a 
new  pair  of  eyes. 

He  saw  into  her,  through  her.  He  saw  her  ignorance,  her 
crudity,  the  shabby,  glib — indolence  of  her  mind.  Indolence ! 
That  was  the  fundamental  characteristic.  She  never  really 
bored  in,  took  hold.  Hard  things  wrere  to  be  avoided — got 
around  anyhow.  Her  beliefs  were  matters  of  choice,  not  ne 
cessity.  She  didn't — literally — know  what  honesty  meant. 
And  the  love  she  had  written  that  wonderful  letter  about  was 
just  a  matter  of  sensation;  stroking  with,  or  being  stroked  by, 
a  velvet  paw.  And  hate — well,  it  came  pretty  much  to  the 
same  thing — only  with  claws  unsheathed.  The  two  could  al 
ternate,  with  her  mood,  upon  the  same  object. 


BIVERDALE  237 

So,  when  the  present  paroxysm  of  anger  reached  its  climax 
and  ebbed  swiftly,  as  it  always  did,  into  a  mood  of  repentant 
humility,  when  she  stretched  out  her  arms  to  him  and  invited 
his  head  to  her  breast,  he  just  sat  where  he  was  and  went  on 
looking  at  her  with  no  more  emotion  than  a  faint  distaste. 
He  felt  like  a  fool. 

Well,  that  about  expresses  the  state  of  mind  ho  had  been  in 
through  the  weeks  that  had  elapsed  since,  whenever  he  re 
viewed,  as  he  had  hardly  failed  daily  to  do,  his  emotional 
history  since  the  outbreak  of  the  strike  last  May,  The  dreams 
he  had  dreamed  of  that  other— illusory— Helena  of  his.  The 
agonies  he  had  suffered  for  and  through  her.  The  tragedies 
he  had  made  of  her  spells  of  bad  temper;  the  enigmas  he  had 
wrestled  with. 

There  was  no  tincture  of  self-pity  about  this.  It  was  his 
own  doing,  all  he  had  done.  He  had  had  plenty  of  good 
counsel,  there  was  no  denying  that.  Even  from  Helena  her- 
self.  Equally  it  was  clear  that  the  thing  must  be  seen  through. 
To  run  whimpering  back  to  his  family  with  the  acknowledg 
ment  that  he  had  been  a  fool,  to  let  them  so  much  as  suspect 
that  he  had  come  to  see  what  they  had  seen  so  clearly  from 
the  first,  would  leave  his  self-respect  without  a  leg  to  stand  on. 

From  now  on  that  chamber  must  be  kept  locked  and  there 
was  none  to  whom  he  could  confide  the  key. 

But  what  Helena  had  just  brought  home  to  him,  here  in  the 
drawing-room,  after  his  father  had  gone  home,  was  that  she 
had  to  be  reckoned  with  as  well  as  himself.  A  mere  cold  en 
durance  was  not  good  enough;  would  not  turn  the  trick.  She 
was  right. 

She  was  more  than  right.  She  was  admirable,  bringing  him 
up  with  a  round  turn  like  that.  He  had  been  posing  during 
these  past  weeks ;  that  was  what  it  came  to.  That  Olympian 
aloofness  of  his,  hadn't  been  quite  the  real  thing.  There  had 
been  hours  when  he  had  wanted  her  hotly.  Was  the  thing 
that  had  held  him  back  from  her  quite  so  highly  idealistic 
and  superior  as  he  had  supposed?  Or  was  it  just  plain 
vanity  ? 

Anyhow,  the  prospect  of  her  leaving  him,  which  with  every 


238  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

appearance  of  good  faith  she  had  just  held  out,  dismayed  him. 
He  looked  up,  and  across  the  room  at  her,  with  a  smile. 

"I  have  been  on  a  high  horse/'  he  said.  "I  must  have 
been  infernally  irritating.  I  have  been  acting  like  a  prig  and 
a  fool.  I  expect  I  have  a  tendency  that  way.  But  don't  go 
off  and  leave  me  now.  Give  me  another  chance.  I  have  an 
idea  I'll  do  better." 

Among  all  the  alternative  possibilities  she  had  contemplat 
ed,  she  could  not  have  included  that  one.  For  a  moment  she 
looked  as  if  she  couldn't  believe  her  ears.  Then,  raggedly, 
she  said: — 

"If  you  mean  that,  come  over  here  and  kiss  me." 

But  he  stayed  where  he  was  in  the  big  chair.  "You  come 
over  here,"  he  said. 

That  talk  with  Helena  produced,  for  the  time  being,  fortu 
nate  results ;  and  in  more  directions  than  one.  The  attitude  she 
enforced  from  him  toward  herself,  the  conviction  she  brought 
home  to  him  that  a  half  loaf,  or  less,  might  still  be  enjoyed 
in  default  of  a  whole  one,  and  that  a  beautiful  and,  occasion 
ally,  loving  woman  could  be  lived  with  after  a  tolerable  fashion 
even  though  she  were  not  the  little  sister  of  one's  soul; — all 
that  helped  him  to  a  philosophical  acceptance  of  his  partial 
alienation  from  his  family.  It  shook  him  out  of  the  exalted 
mood  of  the  past  weeks ;  brought  him  down  to  earth. 

He  stood  alone ;  that  fact  must  be  faced.  He  had  no  unre 
served  solidarity  with  any  person,  such  as  his  wife;  with  any 
group,  such  as  his  family;  with  any  organization,  such  as 
Corbett  &  Company;  even  with  any  system  of  political  and 
social  ideas.  For  it  was  clear  that  he  was  neither  a  conserva 
tive,  a  liberal  nor  a  radical.  By  a  series  of  revolts  he  had  cut 
himself  off,  successively,  from  them  all.  He  stood  alone. 

Well,  then,  let  him  walk  alone.  That  was  well  enough  to 
say.  Only  in  what  direction  ?  Where  ? 

He  struggled  along  with  what  he  called  his  book — though 
he  realized  it  never  would  be  one — for  a  few  weeks  more.  And 
then,  quite  fortuitously,  he  got  the  clew  he  needed.  It  was  so 
plain  that  it  seemed  incredible  he  could  have  been  blind  to  it 
so  long. 


EIVERDALE  239 

To  Helena's  Sunday  supper  parties  (Helena  was  launching 
a  social  career  which  shall  be  dealt  with  later)  there  came, 
occasionally,  one  of  the  professors  from  the  University,  a  so 
ciological  knight-errant  who  loved  to  splinter  a  lance  with  any 
antagonist  and  on  either  side  of  any  dispute.  One  night  he 
brought  a  friend  along — obviously  by  way  of  giving  him  a 
look  at  the  animals.  This  friend,  Allison  Smith  his  name 
was,  on  being  brought  up  for  introduction  to  Hugh,  stared  at 
him  in  undisguised  bewilderment.  He  seemed  more,  rather 
than  less  disconcerted,  when  Hugh,  instantly  calling  him  by 
name  and  shaking  hands  with  the  appearance  of  the  keenest 
pleasure,  explained  to  the  cicerone  that  he  and  Smith  were  two 
old  comrades  in  arms.  They  had  watched  out  some  nights 
together  down  in  the  University  laboratories.  And  when  the 
cicerone  tactlessly  demanded  of  his  friend :  "Why  didn't  you 
tell  me  you  knew  him  ?"  all  Smith,  in  his  daze  could  say  was, 
"I  didn't  know  I  did." 

He  went  on  to  explain,  after  the  laugh  this  brought,  that  he 
remembered  Hugh  perfectly.  Had  failed  merely  to  identify 
him  with  the  Hugh  Corbett  he  had  been  hearing  so  much 
about  lately  and  had  been  brought  around  to  meet. 

The  fact  of  that  identity  seemed  to  go  on  troubling  him. 
His  companions,  right  and  left  at  the  supper-table,  found  him 
absent-minded.  When  he  could,  after  supper,  he  made  a 
chance  to  talk  with  Hugh. 

"I  can't  get  over  it,"  he  said.  "I  never  dreamed  of  associat 
ing  you.  .  ." 

"You  knew  my  name  down  there,  didn't  you  ?"  Hugh  asked, 
a  shade  impatient  over  the  fuss  the  man  was  making  about  a 
trifle.  "There  were  a  half  dozen  of  us,  of  course,  and  I  sup 
pose  you  mislaid  it." 

"I  knew  your  last  name — yes,"  said  Smith.  "I  don't  know 
that  I  ever  heard  your  first  name  mentioned.  And  any 
how  .  .  ."  Then,  with  an  intent  look  up  into  Hugh's  face, 
as  though  the  mystery  were  still  too  much  for  him.  "Why,  my 
God,  man!  You're  a  metallurgist!" 

At  that  Hugh  understood.  Smith  had  been  hearing  about 
a  freak— a  crazy,  windmill-battling  Don  Quixote,  at  •whom 


S40  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

Curiosity  justified  the  trouble  of  taking  a  look.  Coming  to 
take  that  look,  he  had  found,  incrediby,  a  metallurgist — a  man 
whose  mind,  and  whose  professional  attainments  he  knew  the 
(quality  of,  and  respected. 

"I  have  been  in  strange  pastures  lately,  for  a  fact/'  said 
Hugh.  "I'd  about  forgotten  that  I  was  a  metallurgist.  And 
I  am  inclined  to  think  that's  all  I  am  really." 

"It's  enough/'  said  the  other  curtly,  "if  one's  as  good  as  you. 
You  haven't  a  laboratory  of  your  own  then  ?" 

"Not— yet,"  said  Hugh. 

"I  wish,"  said  Smith,  "if  you  could  find  time  this  Week, 
you  would  run  down.  I've  got.  .  .  ." 

And  from  this  point  on,  in  the  evening,  for  a  solid  two 
hours,  oblivious  and  utterly  unintelligible  to  any  of  the  com 
pany  but  themselves,  these  two  talked. 


BOOK  III 

THE  LABORATORY 

CHAPTER  XIX 

IT  is  three  years,  almost  to  the  week,  from  that  Sunday 
night  supper  of  Helena's  (to  which  the  controversy-loving 
sociologist  at  the  University  brought  his  metallurgical 
friend  for  a  look  at  the  animals)  to  the  point  where  we  again 
pick  up  the  thread  of  Hugh's  life. 

It  is  not  because  they  were  unimportant  years  for  him,  that 
we  pass  them  by  in  this  chronicle.  It  may  be  questioned 
whether,  to  the  omnisapient  eye,  any  one  year  in  a  man's  life 
is  more  important  than  another.  Even  his  static  phases  con 
tribute,  likely  enough,  as  much  to  the  final  sum  of  him,  as  his 
kinetic  ones.  But  they  make  heavy  going  for  the  biographer. 

These  three  years  of  Hugh's  were  not  static,  for  he  had  by 
no  means  stood  still  during  the  lapse  of  them.  Considering 
him  as  a  man  of  science — and  that  of  course  is  how  the  world 
will  consider  and  remember  him — those  years  will  very  likely 
be  written  down  as  the  most  important  and  fruitful  years  of 
his  life.  But  his  scientific  achievements  are — necessarily  as 
well  as  preferably — outside  my  province.  For  the  record  of 
them,  I  refer  you  to  his  own  contributions  to  the  Journal  of 
the  Non-Ferrous  Metals  Institute.  There,  if  your  mathemati 
cal,  electrical,  chemical  and  crystallographic  knowledge  is  suf 
ficient  to  enable  you  to  understand  what  it  is  all  about,  you 
may  follow  in  detail  the  earlier  and  less  revolutionary  of  his 
investigations  among  the  ternary  alloys  of  the  white-metal 
group. 

It  is  the  story  of  the  man  and  not  the  scientist  that  I  am 
trying  to  tell.  And  even  with  that,  I  am  dealing  only  in  a 

Ml 


242  AST   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

partial  and  episodic  way ;  with  the  critical  angles  of  his  life, 
to  borrow  a  figure  from  his  own  science ;  with  those  points  at 
which  it  changed  direction — the  points  at  which  new  influences 
intersected  it,  rather  than  with  the  planes  of  uninterrupted 
development.  Most  biographies,  I  suppose,  have  to  be  limited 
to  about  that. 

We  saw  him  first  at  the  time  when  the  capture  of  the  bur 
glar  by  little  Jean,  on  the  eve  of  Anne's  wedding,  brought 
him  out  of  his  laboratory  at  Youngstown,  and  put  him  down 
at  Riverdale,  where,  his  grandfather  calculated,  he  could  get 
the  humanitarian  nonsense  out  of  his  system. 

We  took  up  the  thread  of  his  life  again  at  the  outbreak  of 
the  great  Corbett  strike,  where  Helena  Galicz  came  into  it. 
That  phase  ended  when  he  said  to  Allison  Smith :  "I  believe 
a  metallurgist  is  all  I  am  really." 

From  that  moment  on  for  three  years,  almost  to  a  week,  the 
thread  lies  straight.  And  if,  as  indeed  was  true,  the  man 
himself  as  well  as  the  metallurgist,  changed  in  those  three 
years,  it  was  a  change  so  gradual  and  constant,  that  it  can  best 
be  seen  in  retrospect  as  with  the  eyes  of  one  whom  an  unfaded 
memory  and  a  long  absence  provided  with  the  data  for  meas 
uring. 

It  was  in  October,  nineteen  fifteen,  that  Jean  Gilbert,  with 
her  mother,  came  back  to  Chicago  from  England. 

Major  Gilbert,  we  may  pause  to  explain,  had,  on  the  out 
break  of  the  war,  been  sent  to  Paris,  attached,  not  to  the 
Embassy,  but  to  a  special  military  mission  the  War  Depart 
ment  had  established  there.  He  was  recalled  in  May,  nine 
teen  fifteen,  to  make  a  personal  report  to  the  Chief  of  Staff 
and  was,  immediately  thereafter,  reassigned  to  his  battalion. 
On  his  return  to  America,  his  wife  and  daughter  had  gone 
back  to  England  to  Ethel's  older  sister,  Christine,  both  of 
whose  sons  were  in  the  army.  They  lived  down  in  Surrey,  and 
the  sight  of  Zeppelins,  going  over  to  raid  London  became  a 
familiar  one.  Their  village  had  got  a  casual  bomb  or  two  one 
night,  and  an  old  woman  they  knew  had  been  fatally  hurt. 
Ethel  and  her  daughter,  along  with  Christine,  had  been  work 
ing  all  those  months  as  volunteer  nurses'  aids. 


THE   LABORATORY  243 

They  had  attempted  to  return  to  America  earlier  than  they 
did.  On  the  afternoon  of  August  eighteenth,  they  sailed  from 
Liverpool  on  the  Arabic,  but  that  ill-fated  liner  had  already 
made  the  last  voyage  she  was  ever  to  complete.  She  was  tor 
pedoed,  without  warning,  and  sunk,  by  a  German  submarine, 
just  before  nine  o'clock  the  next  morning. 

The  two  women  were  on  deck,  having  just  finished  breakfast, 
when,  directed  by  the  exclamation  of  a  fellow  passenger,  they 
saw  an  apex  of  foam  glinting  along  toward  the  side  of  the 
ship.  The  next  moment,  almost  masthead  high,  a  great  col 
umn  of  water  spouted  up,  and  they  experienced  palpably,  as 
well  as  audibly,  the  shock  of  an  explosion.  And,  very  promptly 
thereafter,  the  curt  blare  of  a  bugle.  They  both  remembered 
that  ringing  assertion  of  authority  as  immensely  reassuring, 
and  were  inclined  to  credit  it,  in  part  at  least,  with  the  failure 
of  anything  at  all  resembling  panic  to  manifest  itself. 

The  life-boat  to  which  they  had  been  assigned  before  the 
ship  sailed,  was  one  of  the  fortunate  ones  that  was  launched 
without  accident,  and  the  crew  (they  had  no  officer)  pulled 
away  from  the  side  safely  before  the  final  plunge.  Jean  saw 
the  captain  on  the  bridge — incredibly  high,  he  looked,  as  the 
bows  rose  farther  and  farther  out  of  the  water.  She  looked 
as  long  as  she  could  endure  it;  then  covered  her  eyes.  Pres 
ently  she  heard,  with  a  gasp,  as  of  relief,  from  some  one,  "She's 
gone  !"  and  from  another,  "It's  just  seven  minutes." 

They  then  rowed  back  over  the  area  marked  by  a  litter  of 
wreckage — human  and  other — where  the  ship  had  gone  down ; 
and  managed  to  rescue  four  men,  all  members  of  the  crew. 
This  was  a  task  attended  by  great  difficulty  and  considerable 
danger,  since  no  one  in  the  boat  was  capable  of  directing 
operations,  and  there  was  a  heavy  swell,  breaking  every  now 
and  then  in  whitecaps.  The  last  man  they  got  aboard,  one 
of  the  stewards,  was  badly  hurt;  an  arm  crushed  and  all  of 
his  side  stove  in.  Jean  and  her  mother  did  what  they  could 
for  him,  but  it  was,  of  course,  little. 

They  had  been  in  the  boat  about  three  hours,  and  for  the 
last  two,  trying  to  row,  when  they  sighted  a  patrol-boat  coming 
to  the  rescue.  Within  a  mile  of  them,  they  saw  her  sharply 


244  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

alter  her  course  and,  for  a  moment  unaccountably,  open  fire. 
Then  some  one  said : — "It's  the  submarine.  They  can  see  it. 
Waiting  around  to  sink  her,  too." 

It  was  then,  for  the  first  time,  that  Jean  realized  the  human 
malice  and  hatred  that  lay  behind  the  attack;  saw  with  her 
mind's  eye  the  complacent  face,  with  a  hungry,  half-satisfied 
smile  in  its  beard,  watching,  through  the  cobra-hood  of  the 
periscope,  their  little  bobbing  cluster  of  boats;  awaiting  the 
arrival  of  a  rescuer  that  he  might  make  his  crime  complete. 
That  sense  of  the  thing  that  was  waiting  to  strike  again,  was, 
as  she  remembered  afterward,  the  sharpest  emotion  of  all.  It 
was  enforced  by  the  haste  with  which  they  were  bundled 
aboard  the  patrol-boat  and  by  the  intense  alertness  of  the 
watch. 

But  the  gun-fire  had  been  accurate  enough,  perhaps,  to  make 
a  further  attack  seem  too  dangerous.  Another  patrol-boat 
came  up  presently  to  help,  and  all  the  survivors  were  got 
safely  aboard.  At  seven  o'clock  that  night,  they  were  landed 
at  Queenstown.  Mrs.  Gilbert  and  Jean  embarked  again,  six 
weeks  later,  and  this  time  made  a  safe  voyage  home. 

Their  disaster  and  narrow  escape  from  death  on  the  Arabic, 
had  one  personal  result  in  their  lives,  which  was  quite  un 
locked  for.  It  brought  about  a  reconciliation,  long  overdue 
and  just  about  despaired  of  by  Jean,  between  old  Mrs.  Craw 
ford  and  her  daughter  Ethel. 

The  old  woman  had  a  life-long  habit  of  going  first — of  being 
put  first  in  the  consideration  of  all  about  her;  finding  other 
people's  wishes  and  intentions  pliant  to  her  own.  She  had  al 
lowed  herself  to  grow  genuinely  fond  of  this  straight-standing 
young  granddaughter  of  hers,  before  she  realized  how  uncon 
querable  a  thing  the  child's  original  loyalty  was.  When  she 
did  realize  the  quality  of  it,  she  could  not  but  respect  it — 
loved  Jean  all  the  better,  of  course,  for  her  possession  of  it. 
But  she  charged  the  exasperation  it  cost  her,  to  the  account  of 
the  original  rebels,  Roger  and  Ethel. 

But  her  encrusted  vanity  was  not  hard  enough  to  withstand 
the  shock  of  the  event  of  the  nineteenth  of  August.  On  the 
very  day  when  the  evening  papers  reported  the  news,  (she 


THE    LABORATORY  245 

was  at  Bar  Harbor  that  summer)  she  had  had  a  letter  from 
Jean  telling  of  their  intention  to  sail  on  the  Arabic  rather 
than  on  the  dangerously  overcrowded  American  liner,  which 
was  leaving  the  same  clay.  And  it  was  a  dazed,  distracted 
and  utterly  pitiable  old  woman  who  waited  twenty-four  sleep 
less  hours  for  the  reassuring  cable  that  finally  came. 

Jean  wrote  two  letters  to  her  grandmother  in  the  interim 
before  they  sailed  again,  and  what  in  the  first  one  had  been 
a  mere  undercurrent  of  uneasiness  about  her  mother,  became 
an  outspoken  anxiety  in  the  second. 

"She  won't  admit  that  she's  ill.  And  there's  nothing  that 
I  can  really  put  a  finger  on.  It's  like  something  elastic  that 
lias  been  stretched  too  hard.  What  she  counts  on  doing  when 
we  get  home,  is  going  straight  to  Columbus  or  whatever  border 
town  will  be  nearest  to  father.  I  hope  I  can  persuade  her  not 
to.  But  wherever  she  goes,  there's  no  question  of  my  not 
going  with  her." 

Jean's  blunt  refusal  to  consider  a  separation  from  her 
mother  on  any  terms,  missed  the  effect  it  once  would  have 
had,  of  rousing  old  Mrs.  Crawford's  anger.  Within  an  hour 
of  the  receipt  of  Jean's  letter,  she  electrified  Frank  and  Con 
stance  by  informing  them,  by  telegraph,  that  she  meant  to 
spend  the  winter  in  Chicago  and  to  have  Ethel  and  Jean  with 
her.  She  didn't  want  her  own  house — an  old  mansion  on 
Rush  Street  usually  inhabited  by  her  son  and  his  wife  during 
the  winter  months  when  they  were  not  up  at  Lake  Forest — 
but  an  apartment,  furnished,  in  one  of  the  newer  buildings 
on  the  Drive.  There  was  one  belonging  to  Constance  that 
would  do. 

Constance  and  her  husband  agreed  that  Mother  Crawford's 
scheme  was  an  ideal  one  from  every  point  of  view.  To  the  old 
lady,  herself,  whose  existence  had — there  was  no  disguising  it 
— been  growing  lonelier  and  more  barren  from  year  to  year,  it 
would  give  a  new  interest  and  concern;  an  object  for  the  re 
newal  of  those  social  activities  she  had  so  reluctantly  relin 
quished.  It  would  literally  mean  a  new  lease  of  life  for  her. 


246  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

For  Ethel  it  presented  the  one  conceivable  alternative  to  the 
monotonous  and  intensely  familiar  privations  of  life  in  some 
border  town,  enlivened,  to  be  sure,  by  her  husband's  occasional 
visits  but,  conversely,  made  duller  and  deadlier  by  his  long  ab 
sences.  After  what  she  must  have  been  through  in  England 
during  that  past  few  months  she  would  be  in  no  condition — 
Jean's  letter  made  this  clear — for  a  trial  like  that.  A  winter 
with  her  mother,  well  served  and  attended,  a  renewal  of  com 
fortable  old  friendships,  enough  amusements  to  enliven  the 
time  and  enough  leisure  to  relax  in,  ought  to  make  her  ten 
years  younger.  "That's  about  what  she  needs  taken  off,  too," 
mused  Constance.  "The  last  time  I  saw  you  two  together  it 
didn't  seem  possible  that  you  were  twins.  She  might  have 
been  fifty  then.  And  she's  only  forty-one  now!"  Lastly, 
and  with  no  need  for  explanations,  it  would  be  most  awfully 
nice  to  have  young  Jean  about  again. 

So  the  two  of  them  put  their  competent  shoulders  to  the 
wheel  and  got  just  the  apartment  their  mother  wanted.  Con 
stance  spent  days  over  such  matters  as  bedding,  silver  and 
table-linen,  and  in  good  time — well  ahead  of  time,  as  was  her 
way — had  everything  ready. 

There  was  a  bombardment  of  telegrams  from  New  York, 
whither  Mrs.  Crawford  had  gone  to  meet  the  returned  trav 
elers — a  bombardment  that  did  not  slacken — intensified  itself 
rather,  after  the  receipt  of  the  good  news  of  their  safe  arrival. 
They  weren't  coming  at  all.  .  .  They  were  taking  the  fast 
train  this  afternoon  and  must  be  met  at  the  station  with  a 
wheel-chair.  .  .  It  would  be  at  least  a  fortnight  till  they 
could  think  of  coming. 

Finally  they  did  come,  with  no  premonitory  telegram  at  all 
(the  message  had  been  written,  it  afterward  appeared,  but 
not  despatched)  well  within  the  fortnight  that  had  last  been 
prophesied. 

The  consequence  was  that  the  four  of  them  (Mrs.  Crawford 
had  her  maid  along)  descended  to  the  station  platform  about 
four  o'clock  one  wet  afternoon,  and  slowly  followed  their  con 
voy  of  red-caps  up  the  length  of  it,  without  seeing  either  of 
the  familiar  faces  that  might  have  been  expected  to  be  waiting 


THE   LABORATORY  247 

for  them.  There  was  no  need  of  the  wheel-chair.  That  col 
lapse  of  Ethel's  had  proved  as  brief  as  it  had  been  sudden.  But 
Jean  eyed  her  mother  rather  closely  as  they  walked  along.  Old 
Mrs.  Crawford,  brisk  as  ever,  had  got  ahead,  on  the  heels  of 
the  porters. 

At  a  distance  of  fifty  paces,  one  would  have  said  Jean  and 
her  mother  were  sisters.  Ethel  had  never  lost  the  rounded 
slimness  of  outline  her  daughter  had  inherited  from  her.  They 
were  just  of  a  height ;  wore  the  same  sized  gloves  and  shoes  and 
could — and  frequently  did — exchange  garments  indifferently. 
But  if,  at  a  distance,  Ethel  looked  younger  than  her  years, 
she  paid  for  it  as  you  came  nearer — added  not  only  the  twenty 
years  that  was  her  due,  but  easily  another  ten.  Approaching 
strangers  got  a  surprise  that  was  often  visible  to  Ethel  herself, 
and  that  she  winced  at.  Her  hair,  which  you  had  taken  from 
afar  for  a  decided  blonde,  betrayed  when  you  came  near,  the 
indeterminate  ashen  color  that  looks  older  than  white.  And 
the  face  it  framed  was  haggard  with  lines.  Her  skin — you 
knew  it  must  have  been  lovely  once — had  lost  its  tone;  was 
flaccid  now,  where  three  years  before  it  had  merely  looked 
weather-beaten. 

It  was  not  really  Ethel's  fault  that  she  looked  like  that. 
An  army  officer's  wife,  living  nomadically  in  an  alternation 
of  violent  climates,  all  the  way  from  Fort  Laramie  to  Zam- 
boanga,  can  keep  her  looks,  to  be  sure,  but  only  by  making 
them  a  primary  consideration.  Ethel,  long  ago,  had  decided 
that  this  price  was  too  high,  and  deliberately  sacrificed  them, 
along  with  a  lot  of  other  things,  to  her  love  for  her  husband, 
and  his,  as  constant  as  possible,  companionship. 

The  effect  of  illness  on  a  face  whose  one  remaining  beauty 
had  been  that  it  looked  hale  and  sound,  was  particularly  cruel. 

Ethel  said,  aware  of  her  daughter's  solicitude,  "I'm  all 
right.  Don't  keep  looking  at  me.  Of  course  I'd  have  been 
glad  of  the  sight  of  Frank." 

"It  was  in  this  same  station,"  Jean  said,  "that  he  didn't 
meet  me.  When  I  first  came  on,  you  know." 

Involuntarily,  she  caught  her  breath  in  a  little  gasp  over 
the  surprisingly  tight  grip  of  an  emotion  that  took  hold  of 


248  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

her  throat,  as  her  glance  went  down  the  concourse  to  the  big 
bulletin  board  where,  on  that  other  occasion,  Hugh  had  been 
waiting  for  one  of  Anne's  bridesmaids.  Wouldn't  it  be — nice, 
if  he  were  there  now,  waiting  for  somebody  else  ? 

She  smiled;  first  over  the  ridiculous  inadequacy  of  the 
adjective,  and  then,  at  the  emotion  whose  force  made  it  in 
adequate;  at  the  absurd — the  utterly  idiotic  tears  which  she 
felt  flushing  up  into  her  eyes.  Heavens !  Hadn't  she  got  over 
that? 

They  took  a  couple  of  taxis  straight  to  the  Kush  Street 
house. 

That  their  arrival  was  unexpected  was  instantly  apparent 
and  almost  as  quickly  explained  by  the  non-receipt  of  Mrs. 
Crawford's  telegram.  But  a  sense  that  it  was  a  little  worse 
than  unexpected — that  it  made,  in  so  far  as  a  really  welcome 
event  could,  a  contretemps — was  not  so  quickly  accounted  for. 
Constance  was  taking  a  nap  when  they  came.  She  was  called 
at  once,  of  course,  and  came  flying  down,  very  negligee,  to 
welcome  them.  Frank  was  summoned  home  from  the  office; 
the  children  were  hastily  rounded  up  to  be  admired  and 
kissed;  the  inevitable  trivial  first  questions  were  asked  and 
answered  all  in  a  jumble,  anyhow.  But  then  there  came  a 
lapse.  The  same  things  got  said  twice  and  with  uncalled-for 
emphasis.  Constance  was — trying  too  hard. 

Ethel,  less  able  than  the  others  to  go  on  ignoring  a  thing 
like  that  said,  presently,  "We've  come  at  the  wrong  time. 
You've  got  something  planned.  You  mustn't  let  us  be  in 
the  way." 

Constance  hesitated  over  a  total  denial;  then  gave  it  up. 
"There  isn't  a  thing,  now.  Not  for  hours.  Only  Frank  and 
I  have  got  a  party  to-night,  and  I  was  hating  the  thought  that 
we'd  have  to  go." 

"Why  go,  unless  you  choose?"  her  mother-in-law  inquired, 
rather  dryly. 

"We're  giving  it.  Oh',  not  here,"  Constance  hurried  on  to 
explain.  "At  the  Blackstone ;  and  not  till  after  the  theater — 
though  we'll  have  to  go  to  the  show  first,  because  that's  really 
a  part  of  it.  It's — it's  for  Rose  Aldrich.  It's  the  first  night 


THE   LABORATORY  249 

here  of  Come  On  In. — The  thing  she  made  the  costumes  for, 
that  was  such  a  hit  in  New  York  all  last  season.  She's  here 
now  with  Rodney,  and  we're  having  this  for  a  sort  of  celebra 
tion.  It's  very  exciting,  because  Rose  has  promised  that  Lester 
Vernon  and  Ivy  will  both  be  there.  They're  the  stars  in  her 
show,  of  course.  We're  all  wild  enough  over  the  idea  of  meet 
ing  him,  wondering  whom  of  us  he'll  dance  with,  and  so  on, 
but  it's  nothing  to  what  the  men  are  about  her.  I  suspect 
Carter's  begun  dressing  already.  I  really  frightened  Frank, 
asking  him  what  he  thought  would  happen  if  he  kicked  her 
ankle.  They  must  be  worth  about  a  million  dollars  apiece, 
those  ankles." 

"I  remember  Rodney  Aldrich  well  enough;"  Ethel  said, 
"and  I  seem  to  remember  his  having  married  somebody.  But 
do  I  know  her  ?" 

Constance  shook  her  head  decidedly.  "Nobody  did,"  she 
said,  "until  Rodney  married  her.  That  was  three  years  ago 
last  summer— just  about  the  time  you  and  Jean  went  to  Eng 
land.  She's  led  us  a  life  since.  First  we  all  fell  in  love  with 
her,  and  then  we  all  hated  her,  and  now  we're  all  making  up 
our  minds  that  we  love  her  better  than  ever. — All  but  poor 
Frederica,  who  hasn't  quite  got  over  it  yet." 

Constance  had  been  talking  a  little  harder  than  she  was  in 
the  way  of  doing,  from  a  realization  that  her  mother-in-law 
was  getting  ready  to  say  something  disagreeable.  A  very 
audible  sniff  from  the  old  lady  could  not,  at  this  point,  be 
disregarded. 

"She's  a  young  woman,"  Mrs.  Crawford  explained  to  her 
daughter,  "whom  we  had  all  supposed  to  be  a  person  of  sense 
and  breeding,  who  ran  away  from  an  excellent  husband  in 
order  to  be  what  is  called,  nowadays,  a  chorus  girl.  In  my 
day  she'd  never  have  been  allowed  to  come  back." 

"She  didn't  run  away, — exactly  in  order  to  be  a  chorus 
girl,"  Constance  good-humoredly  protested.  "She  was  a  chorus 
girl  for  a  while,  while  she  was  learning  to  make  stage  cos 
tumes.  She's  made  a  perfectly  wonderful  success  of  them." 

&  critical  moment  in  old  Mrs.  Crawford's  life  had  been  that 
when  she  made  the  fancied  discovery  of  a  resemblance  between 


250  AN   AMEEICAN    FAMILY 

her  wit  and  that  of  George  Meredith's  heroines.  She  had 
assiduously  heen  modeling  her  conversational  style  upon  that 
of  those  classical  ladies  ever  since. 

A  smile  of  hard,  glittering  brilliancy  now  appeared  on  her 
face,  and  she  said :  "Bose  Aldrich  made  a  sow's  ear  out  of  a 
silk  purse  and  then  set  about  trying  to  make  silk  purses  out 
of  sows'  ears.  And,  since  they  are  filled  with  gold,  no  one 
will  examine  the  tissue  too  closely." 

The  completeness  of  her  satisfaction  over  this  dubious  piece 
of  wit,  was  made  evident  by  the  number  of  times  she  repeated 
it  during  the  ensuing  season.  Before  she  had  half  done  using 
it,  she  had  worked  herself  into  a  thoroughly  good-humored 
acquiescence  in  Rose's  re-instatement  in  society. 

A  bolus  like  that  always  sticks  in  the  throat  of  conversation 
— momentarily,  anyhow.  And  there  was  a  little  pause  before 
Jean  changed  the  subject. 

"I  don't  even  know,"  she  said,  "who  the  Vernons  are  that 
are  so  exciting." 

"You  have  been  away,"  said  Constance.  "It  doesn't  seem 
possible  that  you  haven't  heard  of  them.  They're  the  most 
wonderful  ballroom  dancers  in  the  world.  They're  simply — 
fabulous.  Anybody  who's  taken  three  lessons  from  either  of 
them,  can  make  his  fortune  teaching  for  the  rest  of  his  life." 

She  checked  herself  rather  abruptly.  The  girl's  smile  had 
come  responsively  enough,  but  there  was  something  a  little 
remote  about  it. 

"We  have  been  away,  that's  true,"  she  said.  "Or  else  we 
haven't  got  back  yet,  I  don't  know  which." 

"I  know,"  said  Constance.  "It  must  be  bewildering.  After 
all  you've  been  through.  We're  going  to  try  to  help  you  for 
get  it."  She  added:  "I  wish  you'd  come  to-night."  She 
turned  to  Ethel.  "We'd  love  to  have  you,  only  I  know  I 
mustn't  ask."  She  also  invited  her  mother,  with  a  humorous 
lift  of  the  eyebrows  and,  on  seeing  the  grim  smile  which  was 
all  the  answer  she  expected,  she  turned  back  seriously  to 
Jean. 

"Won't  you  come,  really?"  she  repeated.  "We'll  have  an 
early  dinner  and  get  your  mother  safely  put  to  bed  before 


THE   LABORATORY  251 

we  need  go.  And  we  can  manage  another  seat  at  the  theater 
perfectly.  Frank  shall  attend  to  it  as  soon  as  he  comes  in. 
Everybody  will  be  there,  and  we'll  make  Rose  have  Lester 
Vernon  dance  with  you." 

Jean  went  to  the  party,  though  it  involved  something  of  a 
scramble  for  her  trunks,  and  a  scant  allowance  of  time  for 
dressing,  and  she  did  not  get  home  till  after  four. 

At  that  hour  she  stole  burglariously  to  her  room,  hoping 
to  avoid  rousing  her  mother  whose  chamber  adjoined  hers. 
The  precaution  was  futile,  however.  At  the  end  of  ten  min 
utes  the  communicating  door  opened,  and  Ethel  in  robe  and 
slippers,  appeared. 

"You  are  a  mouse/'  she  said.  "I  couldn't  be  sure  whether 
you  were  really  there,  or  whether  it  was  just  fancy.  And  I'd 
been  listening  for  you  for  ever  so  long,  too." 

She  cut  short  her  daughter's  contrite,  "Oh,  I  shouldn't  have 
gone !"  with  a  decided  negative. 

"I  have  had  a  splendid  night's  sleep  between  ten  and  two. 
And  if  you  hadn't  gone,  I  shouldn't  have  had  anybody  to  talk 
to  now.  You  don't  mind,  do  you,  telling  me  all  about  it?" 

"Mind  I"  said  Jean.  "Doesn't  everybody  love  to  talk  after 
a  party?" 

So  they  repulsed  the  maid  Constance  had  sent  around  with 
a  whispered  offer  of  services.  Ethel  volunteered  to  solve  the 
intricacies  of  Jean's  hooks  and  stipulated  for  permission  to 
take  down  and  brush  out  the  girl's  hair. 

"I  love  to  do  it,  you  know,"  she  said.  "I  pretend  ifs 
mine." 

"It  is,  for  that  matter,"  Jean  observed.  So,  once  she  had 
got  out  of  her  "things"  and  was  comfortably  robed  for  the 
night,  she  settled  down  on  a  little  foot-stool  between  her 
mother's  knees,  and  began — "at  the  beginning,"  according  to 
Ethel's  instructions — an  account  of  the  party. 

She  told  about  Come  On  In;  how  funny  Mr.  Vernon  was, 
and  how  adorable  his  wife;  the  wonder  of  the  costumes  Mrs. 
Aldrich  had  designed ;  the  brilliancy  of  the  assemblage  in  the 
hotel  ballroom  afterward.  "Only  no  uniforms,  of  course; 
that  seemed  ^ueer." 


253  AN"   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

"There  were  lots  of  people  there  that  I  knew,  and  all  of 
them  were  lovely  to  me.  Gregory  Corbett  and  his  wife.  She's 
the  widow  he  was  in  love  with  so  long.  I  only  just  met  her, 
but  she  must  be  nice,  because  he  is  now. — I  mean,  nicer  than 
he  used  to  be.  He  used  to  seem  a  little  self-satisfied  and  dull. 
And  then  there  was  Carter."  She  smiled  and  sighed  at  once. 
(The  pair  were  seated  before  the  long  dressing  mirror  so  that 
they  could  see  each  other's  faces  while  they  talked.)  "How  I 
used  to  hate  Carter  for  making  me  feel  like  a  little  girl ;  being 
so  lordly  and  superior  and  cock-sure.  I  used  to  try  to  pretend 
to  laugh  at  him  for  it,  but  I  never  could  be  quite  sure  I 
really  did." 

"He's  different  now?"  her  mother  prompted  her  when  she 
paused. 

"Not  very,"  said  Jean  thoughtfully.  "Oh,  he's  different 
to  me."  A  fugitive  smile  came  then,  just  before  a  look  of 
deeper  seriousness.  "He  makes  the  puzzle  all  the  harder  to  un 
derstand.  He,  and  some  of  the  others  like  him.  There  were 
a  lot  of  them  there  to-night.  He's  beautiful,  mother !  Clean 
and  hard  and  slim,  with  that  same  kind  of  wholesome  bright 
ness  about  him.  He  is  the  same  kind  as  those  over  there, 
even  down  to  his  little  tricks  and  ways.  He's  rude  just  the 
way  they  are.  The  kind  of  rudeness  that's  like  a  fresh  bath- 
towel — makes  you  glow.  It's  the  same  race— the  same  blood. 
He  isn't  too  proud  to  fight!  Only  he  doesn't  see.  It's  just 
as  if  all  that,  over  there,  had  never  happened;  was  just  our 
own  little  nightmare,  yours  and  mine. 

"It's  funny,"  she  went  on  after  another  pause.  "Who  do  you 
suppose  the  exception  was,  mother?  There  was  one  there. — 
The  dancing  man,  Mr.  Vernon.  We  did  have  a  dance  to 
gether — danced  a  dance,  I  mean — without  saying  anything 
much.  And  at  the  end  of  it  he  complimented  me  on  how  well 
I  did,  in  a  rather  tired  sort  of  way.  I  suppose  he  says  that 
to  all  the  women  he  dances  with.  Even  those  he  has  to  haul 
around  like  sacks  of  potatoes.  I  said  I  was  surprised  that  I 
could  dance  at  all,  because  I  hadn't  for  so  long.  Because  of 
where  I  had  been ;  there  at  the  hospital  in  Brighton. 

"He  was  just  going  away  when  I  said  that,  but  he  changed 


THE   LABORATORY  253 

his  mind  and  found  a  place  where  we  could  sit  down.  And 
then,  the  first  thing  I  knew,  I  was  telling  him  all  about  it; 
things  you  and  I  haven't  been  able  to  talk  about  to  anybody. 
We  talked  straight  through  two  dances,  and  later  he  came 
back  and  we  sat  out  another.  I  think  I  was  quite  unpopular 
for  a  while.  I  heard  one  girl  say,  going  by — and  I  know  she 
meant  me  to  hear — that  she  had  never  really  understood  the 
fable  of  the  dog  in  the  manger  until  now. 

"He  says  he's  going  over.  He's  under  a  contract  that  he's 
trying  to  carry  out,  but  he  can't  stand  this  sort  of  thing  much 
longer." 

Then,  "Oh,  I  know,"  she  said ;  "they  haven't  had  it  brought 
home.  If  Carter  could  just  have  seen  that  bent  old  man  put 
tering  around  the  wreck  of  his  house,  trying  to  save  little  use 
less  things  out  of  it.  Going  to  tell  his  wife  how  much  there 
was,  to  cheer  her  up.  Trying  to  make  her  understand.  And 
she  dying  there — half  the  bones  of  her  body  broken.  On  pur 
pose,  mother!  Because  there  wasn't  anything  anywhere 
around  for  those  bombs  they  dropped  to  hit  but  just  little 
cottages  like  that.  On  purpose  so  that  everybody  in  the 
world  should  cringe  and  shrink  when  a  German  went  by. 
They  don't  believe  that,  yet,  over  here. — If  I  could  bring  a 
Zeppelin  over  Chicago  to-night,  by  wishing  it,  I  think  I  would. 
Then  they'd  know. — They've  got  over  minding  about  the  sub 
marines.  People  were  asking  me  to-night  why  we  tried  to 
come  home  on  a  British  boat. 

"Oh,  it's  wicked  of  me  to  be  talking  to  you  like  this.  Why 
didn't  I  to  them !  I  wanted  to,  but  somehow  I  couldn't.  The 
words  stuck  in  my  throat. — Of  course  quite  a  lot  of  them 
have  gone.  There  are  thousands  of  Americans,  Mr.  Yernon 
says,  in  the  Canadian  battalions.  Kobody  important  for  the 
papers  to  make  a  fuss  about.  Just,  regular  people — old-time 
American  people,  without  any  attitudes  or  moral  superiorities ; 
not  beyond  being  angry  when  they're  struck  in  the  face." 

The  mother's  hands  rested  a  moment  on  the  girl's  shoulders 
— all  the  remonstrance  that  was  needed.  "That  wasn't  fair," 
she  admitted  instantly.  "Carter — I  can  see  him — all  ablaze, 
and  vet  with  just  that  wonderful  impudence  that  they  have; — 


254  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

that  makes  a  sort  of  sport  even  out  of  the  ghastliest  of  it  It 
is  the  same  blood.  .  .  I'm  starting  around  again." 

She  broke  off  there,  but  her  mother,  looking  in  the  glass, 
could  see  the  thought  that  was,  indeed,  going  round  again. 
With  an  effort  of  her  own,  she  changed  the  subject. 

"How  did  you  like  Rodney  Aldrich's  wife?"  she  asked. 

Jean  brightened.  "Oh,  I  really  liked  her  a  lot.  "We  didn't 
talk  hardly  at  all.  But  what  we  did,  went  to  the  spot  in  a 
way.  She  didn't  ask  me  if  it  wasn't  nice  to  be  back  in  Amer 
ica  again,  nor  say  how  'horrible'  it  must  be  over  there,  nor 
any  of  those  deadly  things.  I  can't  remember  anything  that 
she  did  say,  except  that  she  was  going  to  California  for  a 
month,  in  a  few  days,  but  that  she  hoped  she'd  see  me  when 
she  came  back.  I  hope  she  does.  She'd  be  a  wonderful  person 
to  have  for  a  friend,  in  case  you  happened  to  need  one." 

Her  mother  lau'ghed.  "That's  quite  a  conclusion  to  come 
to  from  her  having  said  she  was  going  to  California,  instead 
of  asking  you  how  it  seemed  to  be  back  home." 

"It  wasn't  anything  she  said,  of  course,"  Jean  admitted. 
"And  there  wasn't  anything  particularly  she  did,  except — well, 
the  way  she  looked  at  me.  As  if  she  really  saw  me,  and  didn't 
mind  my  seeing  her.  It  isn't  often  you  get  a  chance  to  ex 
change  a  look  like  that  with  anybody ;  with  the  wrappings  off, 
you  know.  She  hasn't  been  in  the  war,  but  she's  been — some 
where  that  came  to  about  the  same  thing.  You  can  tell  when 
they  have,  somehow.  Don't  you  think  so,  mother  ?" 

Mrs.  Gilbert  assented  rather  absently.  She  was  tired.  Her 
face — if  Jean  had  looked  up  to  see  it — had  gone  a  little  slack. 
She  would  have  been  glad,  to  tell  the  truth,  of  a  simple  recital 
of  gaieties  without  any  implications.  She  asked :  "Who  else 
was  there?  Any  of  the  people  I  used  to  know?  John  Wil 
liamson,  or  Heaton  Duncan?  Or  William  Forrester?  The 
WMtneys  were  there,  I  suppose.  I  always  liked  Martin." 

Jean  was  able  to  identify  and  report  about  a  few  of  them, 
and  they  got  at  cross-purposes  about  some  of  their  younger 
brothers,  or  older  nephews.  Ethel  wasn't  old  enough,  of 
course,  for  any  of  the  sons  to  come  in  and  confuse  identities. 
Finally  she  asked: — "Anybody  else?" 


THE    LABORATORY  255 

"No,"  Jean  said  rather  decisively,  and  with  a  restless  twist 
of  the  body  at  the  same  time.  "Nobody.  I  mean/'  she  added 
— for  her  mother's  quick  look  invited  explanation — "I  mean 
the  person  I  went  there  specially  to  see  wasn't  there.  That 
was  Hugh!" 

"Hugh  Corbett?"  Ethel  asked, — superfluously  of  course, 
because  she  knew  well  enough ;  merely  because  something  had 
to  be  said.  A  sentence  like  that  last  one  of  Jean's,  if  left 
hanging  up  in  a  silence,  gets  charged  with  a  kind  of  elec 
tricity. 

"Yes,"  Jean  said.  She  leaned  forward  now,  out  of  contact 
with  her  mother's  body,  and  rested  her  elbows  on  her  knees. 
"I've  wanted  to  talk  with  him  ever  since  we  landed  in  New 
York. — Oh,  before  that,  of  course.  All  last  summer.  Every 
time  Punch  came  out  with  a  new  cartoon,  or  the  president 
sent  over  another  note  protesting  about  the  interference  with 
American  commerce.  But  it  was  worse  in  New  York.  Of 
course  we  kept  saying  to  each  other  that  what  we  saw,  there  in 
the  hotel  and  all,  wasn't  the  real  America;  was  just  the 
drunken  scum,  throwing  money  away  and  making  it  back 
again  faster  out  of  its  'war  babies/ 

"But  I've  wondered  all  the  while — haven't  you? — whether 
we  really  understood,  after  all.  Whether  there  mightn't  be 
something  we  didn't  see.  I've  wanted  to  know  how  it  looked 
to — well,  to  Hugh.  When  he  has  explained  it  to  me,  then  I'll 
know." 

"He's  still  infallible,  then?"  Ethel  asked,  with  just  the  light 
breath  of  affectionate  amusement  that  she  wanted  in  her  voice. 
It  was  not  quite  spontaneous.  She  was  rather  more  alert  than 
she  wanted  the  girl  to  guess. 

Jean  smiled  in  response  to  her  mother's  tone,  but  she  an 
swered,  quite  seriously.  "Yes.  Well,  that's  reasonable,  mother. 
He  really  thinks  through  things — without  knowing  when  he 
starts  where  he's  going  to  come  out;  and  there  aren't  many 
people  whose  minds  are  good  enough  for  that,  even  if  they 
wanted  to.  And  then  he's  not  afraid  of  anything  in  the 
world.  Not  of  any  of  the  things  Carter  wouldn't  be  afraid  of 
— nor  of  any  of  the  other  things  that  he  would. 


256  A1ST   AMEKICAN    FAMILY 

"So,  of  course/'  she  went  on  after  having  waited  a  moment 
to  see  whether  her  mother  wished  to  dissent  from  either  of 
these  propositions,  "it  was  to  see  him  and — begin  talking  with 
him,  anyway,  that  I  went  to  the  party  to-night.  And  I  could 
have — wept,  almost,  with  disappointment,  when  I  saw  he 
wasn't  there." 

"Why  wasn't  he  ?"  Ethel  inquired.  "Did  you  ask  Constance 
about  him?" 

"Not  Constance,"  Jean  answered.  "But — his  wife  was 
there.  Mrs.  Williamson  introduced  me  to  her.  She  said 
Hugh  was  in  his  laboratory  with  some  experiment  he  couldn't 
leave,  but  that  she  knew  he'd  be  disappointed  when  he  found 
he'd  missed  me  by  not  coming." 

"Oh,  I'm  curious  about  her,"  said  Ethel.  "Tell  me  about 
her.  I've  wondered  how  that  would  come  out.  Do  you  like 
her?" 

Jean  was  not  very  prompt  with  her  reply.  "I  think  I  will," 
she  said,  finally,  "when  I  have  had  time  to  get  used  to  her  a 
little.  She's  rather — strange,  at  first.  There's  something 
sudden,  that  flashes  up  and  then  goes  away,  that's  rather — • 
frightening.  She's  really  beautiful.  Everybody  seemed  to 
admire  her  a  lot;  especially  the  men.  She  had  on  a  very — 
stunning  gown.  I'd  been  wondering  all  the  evening,  until  I 
met  her,  who  she  was.  And  of  course  it  was  a  little  bit  sur 
prising  to  find  out.  I  thought  she  was  surprised,  too,  at  me. 
But  she  meant  to  be  nice  to  me,  I'm  sure.  She  asked  me  to 
lunch  for  day  after  to-morrow; — Wednesday,  that  is;  it's  to 
morrow  already.  She  says  she  can't  absolutely  promise  Hugh, 
but  that  she  thinks  he'll  come.  I  hope  he  comes,  of  course; 
though  I  don't  suppose  there'll  be  much  chance  for  a  real  talk, 
anyway." 

"Jean,"  her  mother  said,  after  a  pretty  long  silence,  "don't 
you  think  it  might  be  well  to  be  a  little  careful  .  .  ,?" 

"Not  to  fall  in  love  with  him  again,  you  mean;  the  way  I 
did  four  years  ago."  This  was  not  inflected  like  a  question, 
nor  was  there  any  humorous  mockery  in  the  voice.  "I'm  sure 
there  isn't  any  danger  of  that,"  she  went  on.  "I  did  then,  of 
course,  and  I'd  be  sorry  for  myself  if  I  hadn't.  I  think  any 


THE   LABOR  AT  OKY  25? 

child  would.  There's  something  about  him — about  the  way  he 
says  and  does  things — I  don't  know  what  it  is — but  it's  ro 
mantic.  And  for  anybody  that  wasn't  quite  out  of  the  world 
of  fairy  stories  yet  .  .  " 

"Prince  Charming?"  asked  Ethel.  "I'd  hardly  have  thought 
that  of  him." 

"He  was  Cinderella's  prince,  wasn't  he  ?  No,  not  him.  Nor 
Snow  White's,  either.  Nor  Beauty's  prince,  that  was  Beast 
before  she  kissed  him;  nor  Sir  Launcelot — quite — nor  Ivan- 
hoe,  though  they're  nearer.  Mother,  we're  getting  silly.  Let's 
go  to  bed.  They'll  be  blowing  reveille  in  a  few  minutes,  down 
in  Texas." 


CHAPTER  XX 

THE  glimpse  you  have  had  of  Helena  at  the  Crawfords' 
party,  in  a  stunning  gown  and  much  admired,  according 
to  Jean's  report,  especially  by  the  men,  will  have  indi 
cated  to  you — and  truly — a  social  success  which  considerably 
outran  the  earlier  prognostications  of  the  Corbett  family. 

A  number  of  causes  were  contributory  to  this  fact;  the 
chief  of  them  being,  perhaps,  her  ability  to  maintain,  without 
effort,  a  set  of  social  standards  that  were,  quite  simply,  her 
own.  There  was  not  the  smallest  streak  of  the  snob  in  her; 
no  disposition  at  all  to  be  overwhelmed  by  name  or  place; 
to  make  her,  on  the  one  hand,  cringing,  subservient,  genteel ; 
or,  on  the  other,  uneasily  self-assertive. 

She  had,  back  in  the  days  before  she  married  Hugh,  a  nu 
cleus  of  friends  and  admirers,  in  a  set  that  loosely  gets  spoken 
of  as  "Bohemian";  not  all  extreme  radicals,  but  mostly — a 
group  that  sometimes  inundated  Alice  Hayes'  flat,  and  made 
itself  as  much  at  home  in  half  a  dozen  other  places. 

Helena's  marriage,  and  her  commodious,  informal  estab 
lishment,  made  her  at  once  the  focal  figure  of  this  group  and 
gave  her  the  power  of  contracting  or  expanding  it,  where  and 
in  whatever  directions  she  pleased. 

The  direction  she  took — and  I  do  not  think  this  fact  is  one 
to  be  regarded  with  surprise — was  away  from  the  real  revo 
lutionaries  and  toward  the  intellectuals  and  esthetes.  She 
had  been,  back  in  the  days  when  she  made  that  hawk-like 
swoop  upon  Riverdale,  a  real  revolutionist.  She  had  shared, 
that  is  to  say,  the  economic  pressures  of  the  class  she  was 
fighting  for.  Hunger,  cold,  the  tyrannical  operation  of  the 
law,  were  personal  and  not  abstract  possibilities.  She  honestly 
hated  the  rich  as  her  own  actual  oppressors.  And  her  efforts 
to  accomplish  their  downfall  were  made  with  no  lurking 

258 


THE   LABORATORY  259 

reservation  that  it  did  no  harm  to  try,  since  the  thing  could 
not  be  brought  about  within  her  lifetime  an}rway. 

But  upon  her  marriage  with  Hugh,  all  the  surfaces  of  her 
life — the  whole  crystalline  organization  of  it — changed.  And 
the  shape  of  her  ideas  changed  to  match,  though  of  the  extent 
of  this  transformation,  she  remained  unaware.  That  she  now 
had  charge  accounts  at  the  big  stores,  enjoyed  the  privileges  of 
her  husband's  clubs ;  that  she  could  drive  whenever  she  liked, 
in  taxi-cabs,  and  eventually  had  a  car  of  her  own,  may  seem 
irrelevant  and  inconsequent  facts;  but  they  were  not.  They 
made  up  a  new  fabric  of  realities  for  her  and  in  doing  so, 
they  made,  of  what  once  had  been  her  grim  realities,  toys. 

Without  taking  that  truth  into  account,  it  would  be  hard 
to  explain  the  importance  in  her  life,  during  the  first  year 
after  her  marriage,  of  young  Boyd  Barr.  Encountering  him 
at  any  time  prior  to  her  marriage,  she  would  have  passed 
him  by  as  not  worth  a  second  look. 

There  is  a  very  strong  disposition  in  Chicago — by  no  means 
confined  to  the  rich,  though  best  advertised  and  most  effective 
among  them, — to  Do  Something  for  Art.  I  don't  know 
whether  it  is  fairer  to  say  that  Boyd  Barr  seized  upon  this 
disposition,  or  that  it  seized  upon  him.  At  any  rate,  they 
coincided  very  nicely,  and  the  result  of  this  coincidence  was 
a  slim,  well  printed  magazine  bound  in  cartridge  paper,  and 
called  the  Red  Review.  Barr,  under  pseudonyms,  was  most  of 
the  contributors,  as  well  as  editor  under  his  own.  He  had 
managed  to  create  the  illusion  in  a  small  sector  of  the  public 
mind,  that  it  would  be — well,  one  of  the  minor  failures  of 
civilization,  and,  locally,  a  reflection  on  Chicago's  pretense  to 
enlightenment,  if  the  Red  Review  were  allowed  to  perish.  So, 
though  chronically  in  a  sinking  condition,  it  was  perpetually 
being  saved.  Eepeatedly  it  had  announced  its  own  demise  and 
held  a  little  funeral  service  over  itself.  But  the  pathos  of  this 
act  always  stimulated  ^somebody,  in  the  extreme  instant,  to 
rush  to  the  rescue  with  the  two  hundred  and  eighteen  dollars 
— or  whatever  the  amount  might  be — that  would  enable  it  to 
go  on. 

Basr  took  Helena  on  as  a  disciple;  criticized  her  writings, 


260  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

and  was  amazed  at  her  aptness  in  responding  to  his  sugges 
tions.  He  printed  some  highly  explosive  free  verse  of  hers  in 
the  Red  Review,  and  proudly  proclaimed  her  his  discovery. 
He  collaborated  with  her  in  a  short  horrible  play  or  two,  whose 
production  they  superintended  at  the  Drama  Workshop — an 
earnest  organization  of  amateurs,  every  one  at  least  a  potential 
playwright.  And  he  devoted  himself  seriously  to  building  up 
her  Sunday  nights  into  a  real  salon. 

He  had  a  pretty  good  social  sense,  understood  that  the 
success  of  any  company  depended  en  the  correct  proportion 
ing  between  audience  and  performers.  And  a  wide  acquaint 
ance  in  most  of  the  social  strata  from  the  very  top  to  the  very 
bottom,  enabled  him  to  mix  his  ingredients  nicely.  Of  those 
mysterious  nomads  who  drift  vaguely  about  in  any  big  city, 
lecturing  on  strange  things,  reading  strange  poetry,  dancing 
esoteric  and  philosophical  dances,  collecting  funds  for  distant 
and  rather  incredible  enterprises,  he  selected  the  more  de 
sirable  and  brought  them  around  to  Helena. 

At  the  end  of  a  year  of  this  sort  of  thing,  they  parted — in 
great  bitterness  on  his  side — over  her  peremptory  and  rather 
contemptuous  refusal  to  become  his  mistress. 

He  had,  it  may  be  owned,  some  grounds  for  feeling  aggrieved. 
She  had  avowed,  from  the  beginning  of  their  acquaintance, 
an  attitude  toward  marriage  as  widely  latitudinarian  as 
his  own,  and  she  had  made  no  pretense  to  a  consum 
ing  passion  for  her  husband.  Such  a  pretense  would,  indeed, 
have  been  idle.  The  relation  between  this  married  pair  had 
attenuated  itself,  visibly,  under  Barr's  eye.  He  was  justified, 
though  mistaken,  in  supposing  it  to  have  been  from  the  first 
an  affair  of  convenience  on  her  part  and  of  infatuation,  rap 
idly  waning,  on  her  husband's.  (He  had  not  become  a  fre 
quent  visitor  at  the  house  until  after  the  fire  and  the  quarrel 
that  resulted  from  it.)  But  whereas,  at  the  beginning,  Hugh's 
presence  at  all  Helena's  parties  had  been  something  to  reckon 
upon  and  he  had  often  made  a  third  in  their  discussions,  of 
late  his  necessary  presence  at  the  laboratory,  at  unlikely  as 
well  as  likely  hours,  had  been  pleaded  so  often  as  to  be  taken 
by  Barr  for  nothing  but  the  baldest  fiction.  A  man  of  more 


THE    LABORATORY  261 

masculine  temper  might  have  felt  nettled  over,  the  good- 
humored  indifference  with  which  this  husband  consigned  a 
beautiful  young  wife  to  his  company;  but  Barr  hadn't  much 
of  the  sort  of  pride  that  would  have  been  affronted  by  this, 
and  cheerfully  made  the  most  of  the  opportunities  it  offered. 
The  woman's  contempt  was  another  matter,  though,  and  he 
writhed  under  it. 

The  whole  blighting  force  of  it  was  not  turned  upon  him 
until,  very  unwisely,  he  taunted  her  with  being  at  heart,  after 
all,  merely  respectable.  That  untrammelled  spirit  she  boasted, 
was  nothing  but  a  pretense.  She  might  like  to  think  she 
was  a  hawk,  but  when  one  opened  the  door,  it  appeared  that 
she  preferred  the  cage. 

For  a  moment  Helena's  eyes  glowed  dangerously;  then  she 
chose  the  more  cruel  method  of  good-humored  ridicule. 

"Just  because  I  don't  want  to  fly  away  with  a  chippering 
little  sparrow  like  you?"  she  asked.  "Hugh  would  cut  up  into 
a  dozen  of  you.  Go  away  and  get  over  your  sulks.  And  then, 
whenever  you  like,  come  back.  You're  nice  enough  to  have 
about ;  I  won't  deny  that.  Except  when  you're  out  of  temper. 
And  then  you're  ridiculous.  Hugh's  never  that,  at  least." 

He  never  did  come  back;  and,  present!}',  he  moved  away 
to  New  York,  taking  the  Red  Review  along  with  him  in  a 
hand-satchel.  Whenever  he  talked  of  Helena  after  that, — 
and  at  a  certain  stage  of  intoxication,  he  invariably  did — it 
was  as  of  a  vampire  who  had  sucked  his  life-blood  and  then 
cast  him  off. 

He  is  not,  perhaps,  a  deserving  object  of  sympathy.  Espe 
cially  if  one  stops  to  consider  the  different  outcome  of  their 
companionship  that  he,  from  the  first,  had  meant  and  fore 
seen.  But  this  remains  to  be  noted;  that  she  did  not  finally 
turn  him  off  until  she  had  got  all  the  profit  out  of  him  that  he 
could  be  made  to  yield.  When  he  went  away,  she  was  perfectly 
competent  to  walk  alone  along  her  chosen  path.  Even  her — 
now  celebrated — Sunday  nights  never  missed  him.  Indeed, 
it  was  not  until  he  had  gone  away  that  full  recognition  of 
herself  as  a  personage,  was  granted.  She  was  too  wise  to  put 
a  successor  in  his  place. 


262  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

Her  prevalent  mood  during  the  next  two  years,  was  self- 
satisfaction.  And  it  would  have  taken  a  bold  prophet  to  deny 
the  solidity  of  her  grounds  for  it.  The  change  in  her  from  the 
awkward  girl  in  the  ill-fitting  dress,  who  so  plainly  had  not 
known  what  to  do  with  Hugh  when  he  called  on  her  that  first 
Sunday  afternoon  in  Alice  Hayes'  flat,  to  the  woman  in  the 
stunning  gown  whom  Jean  found  at  the  Crawfords'  party, 
amounted  fairly  to  a  metamorphosis.  If  the  process  was  not 
one  of  true  growth,  at  least  it  was  the  easiest  thing  in  the 
world  to  mistake  for  it — an  immense  enlargement  and  varie 
gation  of  her  world,  a  pushing  back  of  her  personal  bounda 
ries,  a  wider  currency  for  her  word  a^d  deed.  She  was  con 
tinually  and  pleasurably  busy.  Opportunities  for  a  great 
number  of  sorts  of  activity  crowded  her  threshold.  She  had 
only  to  select  among  them  and  invite  them  in.  But  her  liter 
ary  work  remained  the  favorite. 

She  had,  to  be  sure,  given  up,  back  in  the  days  of  Boyd 
Barr's  tutelage,  her  syndicate  arrangement  with  that  New 
York  editor,  and  the  consequent  sharp  decrease  in  her  earn 
ings  that  resulted  from  this,  necessitated  her  accepting  an 
allowance  from  Hugh.  True  Art  had  never  got  adequately 
paid  for  since  the  capitalist  system  had  been  established. 

Of  late,  she  had  been  planning  a  novel — an  immense  affair; 
a  great,  grimly  ironic  cross-section  of  the  human  comedy  from 
the  top  crust — which  her  new  acquaintance  with  smart  so 
ciety  would  provide  the  materials  for — all  the  way  down  to 
the  bottom,  where  her  own  childish  and  adolescent  memories 
were  a  sufficient  reservoir. 

(Planning  a  novel,  it  may  be  noted,  is  one  of  the  most  com 
fortable  occupations  in  the  world.  There  is  a  fine  spacious 
Icisureliness  about  it,  since  it  is  obvious  that  a  work  of  that 
sort  can  not  be  hurried.  Gathering  material  for  it  patently 
involves  all  sorts  of  stimulating  excursions ;  it  entails  a  rigor 
ous  exclusion  from  one's  daily  routine  of  all  harassing  duties 
and  entanglements.  In  a  word,  it  transfuses  doing  whatever 
one  likes,  with  the  glow  of  a  good  conscience.  And  it  can  be 
kept  going,  in  the  absence  of  the  need  of  money  and  of  skep 
tical  friends  and  relations,  almost  indefinitely.) 


THE    LABORATORY  263 

Helena  wrote  sometimes,  when  her  mood  invited  it.  But, 
as  she  always  told  Hugh  when  she  read  these  fragments  aloud 
to  him,  they  were  merely  preliminary  studies  or  notes.  The 
moment  for  committing  herself  concretely  to  beginning  it, 
seemed  to  get  no  nearer.  She  saw  nothing  ominous  about 
that.  At  any  rate,  never  admitted,  even  to  herself,  that  she 
did. 

This,  as  I  have  said,  was  her  prevailing  mood.  But  there 
was  another;  tolerably  rare,  and  fortunately  brief — at  longest 
it  never  lasted  more  than  a  day  or  two,  and  often  an  hour, 
sometimes  a  mere  moment,  saw  the  beginning  and  the  end  of 
it.  But  while  it  lasted  it  stabbed  like  a  neuralgia.  Always 
it  was  out  of  the  jungle  of  memory  that  it  sprang  upon  her. 
Sometimes  it  came  when,  after  a  particularly  gratifying  suc 
cess  of  hers,  she  let  herself  attempt  to  measure  the  distance 
she  had  come,  in  a  deliberate  retrospect;  back  to  the  meager, 
big-eyed  slum  child,  with  the  idle  immigrant  father,  sitting 
beside  him  in  the  back  room  of  some  saloon,  listening  with 
strange,  uncomprehending  excitement,  while  men  talked  about 
the  General  Strike  and  the  Social  Revolution.  How  amazing  a 
flight  from  that  to  this. 

And  yet — here  came  the  stabbing  doubt — what  would  that 
Helena  have  thought  of  this  one? 

Sometimes  it  was  a  mere  coincidence — a  chance  resemblance 
— real  or  fancied — of  a  face,  that  evoked  a  concrete  memory. 
This  was  what  happened  late  one  snowy  afternoon,  when, 
driving  out  on  West  Chicago  Avenue  to  get  Hugh  at  his  labo 
ratory,  her  car  was  held  up  by  a  blockade  of  traffic.  There  was 
a  strike  on  at  one  of  the  factories  out  here,  it  seemed,  and 
there  was  what  would  be  spoken  of  the  next  morning  in  the 
police  reports  as  a  mob  in  the  street — a  crowd  of  people,  that 
is  to  say,  eight-tenths  of  them  merely  curious,  listening  while 
a  girl  made  a  speech  from  the  upper  step  of  a  doorway. 

One  of  the  pickets  she  must  have  been — a  slight  young 
girl  in  a  round  little  plush  hat  that  had  taken  on,  from  the 
melting  snow,  the  drowned  look  which  that  fabric  exhibits 
when  it  is  wet.  Her  neck  was  bare  of  any  sort  of  scarf.  She 
had  on  no  outdoor  garment  beyond  the  boyish  jacket  that  went 


264  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

with  her  suit.  Between  excitement  and  cold,  she  had  to  talk 
with  her  teeth  locked  together,  and  she  was  saying  her  say  as 
fast  as  she  could,  since  the  arrival  of  a  policeman,  coming 
along,  hand  over  hand  through  the  crowd,  was  going  to  termi 
nate  it.  Helena's  car  moved  on  again  just  as  the  policeman 
reached  out  a  hand  for  the  girl. 

The  little  vignette  that  had  actually  been  beneath  her  eyes 
hardly  reached  her  consciousness  at  all.  What  she  really  saw 
was  another  impromptu  street-corner  meeting,  on  a  Christmas 
Eve,  addressed  by  a  girl  even  younger  than  this  one — sixteen 
almost  to  the  day.  The  snow  had  been  coming  down  in  big 
flakes  and  clinging  just  as  it  did  now,  and  that  girl  had  shiv 
ered,  too,  and  talked  through  locked  teeth,  and  the  feet  inside 
her  sodden  shoes  had  felt  as  cold  and  dead  as  lumps  of  marble. 
She  had  been  frightened,  that  girl,  and  yet  exultant  in  her 
fear ;  begging,  but  proudly.  She  was  collecting  the  money  to 
get  her  father,  Anton  Galicz,  out  of  jail — the  authorities  hav 
ing  neglected,  for  once,  to  lock  her  up  with  him. 

It  was  that  Helena's  eyes  that  now  encountered  this  one's 
with  a  questioning  stare  that  stabbed.  No  need  to  ask  what 
that  flaming  young  proselyte  to  her  father's  gospel  thought 
of  the  befurred  thing  in  the  motor-car.  The  excruciating 
fact  was  that  the  woman  in  the  car  still  professed  the  same 
gospel  as  the  girl  on  the  soap-box.  A  repudiation  of  it, 
the  admission  of  a  new  enlightenment,  which  could  afford  to 
look  back  tenderly  upon  it  as  a  generous  but  misguided  fanati 
cism,  would  have  excused — explained,  anyhow,  the  abyss  be 
tween  the  two;  but  it  had  never  been  made.  There  was  no 
shield  that  the  burning  contempt  in  the  girl's  eyes  could  not 
penetrate.  It  was  hours  before  that  ghost  would  look  away. 
And  it  was  never  completely  laid. 

There  were  other  ghosts,  too ;  ghosts  of  other  Helenas ;  espe 
cially  of  a  later  one — of  an  older  and  much  less  remote 
Helena ;  a  Helena  that  was  her  mother's  daughter  much  more 
than  her  father's,  and  )ret,  though  the  mother's  side  may  have 
been  said  to  have  won  the  victory,  no  less  contemptuous — • 
asking  a  question  that  rankled  even  more  bitterly.  Was  this 
relation  that  Helena  Corbett  had  settled  into  with  her  hus- 


THE   LABORATORY  265 

band  the  great  thing  that  that  brave  young  adventuress,  rid 
ing  about  the  world  on  her  high  horse,  had  dreamed  of — 
guarded  her  virgin  altar  for  ? 

Well,  of  course  it  was  not.  Had  it  ever  been?  Even  in 
those  very  first  days,  when  she  had  tried  so  hard  to  believe  it 
was  ?  Before  that  long  train  of  quarrels  that  had  been  set  off 
by  Robert  Corbett's  telegram,  had  begun?  Once  more  the 
answer,  plain  enough  now,  was  no.  It  never  had  been  that 
great,  wonderful  dreamed-of  thing.  Why  not?  Was  it  the 
fault  of  her  dreams  that  the  reality  had  fallen  so  far  short  of 
them  ?  She  had  adopted  that  long  ago  as  a  sort  of  provisional 
explanation;  the  more  easily  since  her  married  life  was  so 
crowded  with  new  and  absorbing  experiences. 

For  the  first  year  Boyd  Barr  had  kept  her  busy  with  that 
new  world  of  his ;  new  ideas — new  terminologies,  at  any  rate — 
new  people,  new  attitudes ;  a  new  ambition  toward  literature. 
She  had  spent  another  year,  after  her  break  with  him,  making 
it  all  her  own ;  discovering  her  ability  to  walk  alone ;  making 
minor  personal  conquests  here  and  there,  as  she  needed  them, 
to  render  her  new  position  secure;  settling  herself  firmly  in 
the  saddle  and  acquainting  herself  with  the  paces  of  the  new 
horse  her  marriage  had  given  her  to  ride.  But  by  the  begin 
ning  of  the  third  year  the  novelty  was  exhausted.  The  ad 
venture  had  become  as  tame  as  a  drive  round  Lincoln  Park. 
Her  novel  had  palled  upon  her,  though  the  first  chapter  of  it 
was  still  unwritten. 

It  would,  of  course,  always  remain  unwritten.  All  those 
postponements  of  hers,  excused  in  the  interest  of  collecting 
new  material,  all  those  "preliminary  studies,"  were  merely 
so  many  indolent  evasions  of  the  effort  it  always  takes — the 
immense  expenditure  of  energy  it  wants — to  transform  the 
easy  dream  into  the  hard  concrete  reality. 

That  indolence,  which  Hugh,  in  a  clairvoyant  moment, 
had  once  attributed  to  her,  was,  indeed,  the  besetting  vice  of 
her  character  as  it  is,  I  suppose,  of  most  restless  people.  They 
are  apt  to  be  spoken  of,  in  contempt,  sometimes,  and  some 
times  in  admiration,  as  idealists.  They  dream,  with  passion 
ate  persuasion,  some  of  them,  of  a  kindlier,  easier  world,  that 


266  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

this  hard  one  of  ours  ought  somehow  to  he  transformed  into; 
but  the  fact  remains  that  they  dream.  They  do  not,  as  Hugh 
put  it,  bore  in ;  take  hold. 

To  Helena,  the  realization  that  marriage  was  no  longer  an 
inexhaustible  wonder-box  of  new  experiences,  brought  back  the 
old  restlessness,  the  old  resentment — smoldering  just  now  in 
the  absence  of  any  wind  to  blow  it  into  a  flame.  Once  more 
she  began  wondering  why  the  thing  which  she  had  expected 
to  prove  the  emotional  climax  of  her  life,  should  have 
quenched  down  into  this  that  it  was. 

She  and  Hugh  got  on  well  enough.  They  seldom  quarreled 
any  more.  They  chatted  amicably  over  their  meals  even  when 
they  were  alone,  and  to  her  friends — even  the  wildest  of  them 
• — he  was  always  courteous.  His  rather  dry  humor,  though  her 
inability  to  understand  it  sometimes  exasperated  her,  never 
roused  the  old  angry  suspicion  that  the  enigma  was  a  cloak 
for  malice.  He  never  tried  to  interfere  with  her  liberty.  And, 
as  the  saying  is,  they  lived  together.  But  was  this  all  she  was 
entitled  to  ?  Was  a  tepid,  half  contemptuous  liking,  punctu 
ated  by  moments  of  only  half  satisfied  passion,  the  best  thing 
there  was  to  hope  for?  Or  was  there,  still  before  her — the 
great  possibility? 

That  last  question  must,  I  suppose,  have  been  latent  in  hei 
mind  from  the  first,  strongly  enough  to  have  prescribed  ono 
line  of  conduct.  Hugh  had,  at  the  beginning,  been  eager,  im 
patient,  for  a  child;  wanted  a  lot  of  children.  She  had  met 
this  wish  of  his  with  no  blunt  denial ;  avowed  no  permanently 
contrary  intent.  But  she  was  unremitting,  and  successful, 
in  her  precautions  against  being  overtaken  by  maternity. 
After  the  first  few  months  her  husband  had  ceased  to  talk 
about  it;  seemed  to  have  forgotten. 

It  was  at  the  Crawfords'  party  that  she  was  roused  to  an 
amused  realization  of  a  change  that  had  taken  place  in  her 
own  attitude  toward  her  husband.  She  had  asked  Violet 
"Williamson  who  the  girl  was  who  was  sitting  out  all  those 
dances  with  Lester  Vernon.  "Why,  that's  Jean  Gilbert,"  Vio 
let  had  said,  a  little  surprised  that  she  didn't  know. 

Jean  Gilbert !    Helena  drifted  off  into  a  retrospect.    What  a 


THE   LABORATORY  267 

lot  that  name  had  meant  to  her  once !  How  bitterly  jealous 
of  it  she  had  been !  She  had  never  doubted  the  accuracy  of 
that  first  surmise  of  hers  on  reading  the  girl's  congratulatory 
note  to  Hugh ;  his  anger  had  only  confirmed  her  in  it.  The 
girl  who  had  meant  to  marry  him;  the  girl  his  family  had 
wanted  him  to  marry.  As  a  mere  abstraction — she  never  had 
been  anything  more  than  that — she  served  Helena,  for  months, 
as  an  emotional  objective.  Hugh's  silent  moods  were  often 
enough  assigned  to  a  regret  that  he  had  not  married  that  other 
girl.  Even  his  indifference  to  other  women,  when  she  had 
satisfied  herself  of  its  genuineness,  could  as  easily  be  attributed 
to  a  sentimental  longing  for  the  absent  Jean  as  to  a  loyal 
devotion  to  herself. 

That  feeling  had  worn  away  to  nothing  long  ago ;  she  hadn't 
thought  of  the  girl  for  a  good  two  years.  Only  the  process 
had  been  insensible,  for  it  was  not  till  now,  when  Jean  was 
identified  for  her,  that  she  was  aware  it  had  taken  place.  She 
had  made  a  mountain  out  of  a  molehill  that  time,  to  be  sure. 
Hugh  in  love  with  that  child  ?  Preposterous !  Why,  he  wasn't 
capable  of  being  in  love — enough  to  matter — with  any  one. 
With  no  one  more  than  with  herself.  What  he  gave  her  was 
all  he  could  give.  What  he  wanted  from  her  was  all  he  could 
want.  From  anybody ! 

It  would  be  amusing  to  see  what  he'd  make  of  Jean  now  that 
she  was  back.  He'd  sentimentalize  over  her  in  his  own  queer 
ineffectual  way,  no  doubt — if  let  alone.  Well,  she  was  welcome 
to  anything  she  could  get  from  him. 

It  was  utterly  characteristic  of  Helena  that  she  should 
leave  out  of  account  altogether  the  possibility  of  any  deeper 
feeling  on  the  girl's  part.  From  the  first,  she  had  never  ques 
tioned  her  assumption  that  to  Jean,  Hugh  had  represented 
merely  an  opportunity  she  had  not  been  clever  enough  to 
grasp. 

She  had  never  considered  the  women  of  her  husband's 
world  as  capable  of  the  experience  of  a  real  passion,  and  the 
occasional  instances  to  the  contrary  that  had  been  brought 
home  to  her  since  her  better  acquaintance  with  them,  had 
always  been  dismissed  as  exceptions.  They  flirted,  of  course, 


263  AS"  AMEEICA:\  FAMILY 

just  as  Jean,  over  there,  was  obviously  flirting  now  with  the 
dancer,  but  the  proprieties  could  always  be  relied  upon  to 
intervene — in  time.  You  may  remember  how  this  attitude  of 
hers  had  tinged  the  love  letter  she  had  written,  years  before, 
to  Hugh.  She  did  not  suppose,  she  had  said,  that  the  girls 
he  knew  were  in  the  habit  of  boasting  their  virginity  to  a 
lover.  Perhaps  there  were  no  prophets  of  Baal  about  their 
altars.  Or  perhaps  the  true  fire  never  came  down  from 
Heaven.  She  didn't  know. 

Something — a  mere  momentary  flash  of  the  old  hostility — 
had  leaped  up  when  she  first  met  the  girl  and  talked  with 
her;  enough,  just  momentarily  to  have  troubled  Jean,  and 
been  reported  afterward  to  her  mother.  But  it  had  died  down 
as  swiftly  as  it  had  arisen,  and  from  that  point  on,  her  profes 
sions  of  pleasure  over  the  girl's  return  and  of  a  hope  that 
they  would  see  a  lot  of  each  other,  had  been,  in  their  own 
fashion,  genuine.  She  did  hope  she  could  get  Hugh  home  for 
lunch  on  Wednesday.  She  relished,  only  half  maliciously, 
the  notion  of  launching  an  "affair"  for  him.  His  sort  of 
affair ! 

Jean,  arriving  with  military  punctuality  for  Helena's  lunch 
at  one  o'clock  on  Wednesday,  was  ushered  by  a  maid  into 
a  drawing-room  whose  only  occupant  was  a  stranger  to  her. 
Having  noted  a  man's  hat  on  the  settee  in  the  hall,  she  had 
entertained  the  hope  of  Hugh ;  and  before  the  bulky  figure  in 
front  of  one  of  the  bookcases  could  face  around,  she  had  time 
for  the  absurd  thought,  "He  can't  have  changed  as  much  as 
that !"  The  man  was  not  by  inches  as  tall  as  Hugh ;  was  very 
blond,  blue-eyed,  broad-faced.  His  head  was  an  only  slightly 
modified  cube;  his  trunk  a  parallelepiped.  He  had  rather  the 
look — attractive  to  some  persons  no  doubt — of  a  well-bred  bull. 

He  said,  in  an  accent  which  she  bristled  at  as  German: 
"Miss  Gilbert?"  And  then  introduced  himself  by  the  name 
of  Bjornstadt.  "Our  beautiful  hostess,"  he  explained,  "does 
not  count  punctuality  among  the  virtues.  So  I  am  under  her 
instructions  to  make  you  at  home  until  she  shall  be  dressed." 

There  was  no  doubt  of  his  being  quite  at  home  himself, 
and  his  conversational  resources  were  more  than  adequate. 


THE   LABORATORY  269 

But  Jean  had  a  struggle  during  the  whole  of  the  twenty  min 
utes  that  elapsed  before  Helena  came  down,  to  get  beyond 
monosyllables.  If  she  had  been  coached  about  him,  as  he 
evidently  had  been  concerning  her,  she'd  no  doubt  have  done 
better.  He  knew  the  main  facts  in  her  recent  history  and 
geemed  determined,  by  questions,  to  elicit  details.  He  set 
about,  with  considerable  address,  getting  an  account  from  her 
of  the  sinking  of  the  Arabic.  How  much  warning  had  they 
had  ?  Was  it  true  that  the  ship  had  changed  her  course  in  the 
attempt  to  rain  the  submarine?  What  measures  had  been 
taken  prior  to  the  "accident,"  to  provide  for  the  speedy  em 
barkation  of  the  passengers  in  life-boats  ? 

Then,  finding  this  theme  unfruitful,  he  spoke  in  a  friendly, 
familiar  way,  about  England;  remarked  that  it  was  months 
since  he  had  visited  that  country,  and  wanted  to  know  how, 
in  her  opinion,  the  English  were  taking  the  war. 

Well,  he  mightn't  be  a  German;  probably,  since  his  name 
was  Bjornstadt,  was  not.  But  he  was  a  foreigner,  in  the  sense 
in  which  no  Englishman,  nor  Frenchman,  ever  could  be  to  her 
again.  And  these  were  matters  which  she  simply  could  not 
bring  herself  to  talk  about  freely  with  a  foreigner. 

Then,  too,  his  smiling  assurance  and  the  florid  gallantry  of 
his  manners,  rubbed  her  fur  the  wrong  way.  She  felt — was 
Btill  young  enough  to  feel — that  any  manifest  disapproval  of 
him  on  her  part,  would  be  ridiculous.  She  could  not  be  sure, 
toward  the  last,  that  it  hadn't  begun  to  take  him  that  way. 
His  demure  observation  that  but  for  having  been  told  who  she 
was,  he  would  have  taken  her  for  an  English  girl,  struck  her 
as  indicating  that. 

Helena's  eventual  descent,  in  a  rather  dressy  hat,  did  not 
improve  the  situation,  either.  Bather,  indeed,  the  contrary. 
She  seemed  as  foreign  as  he. 

"It's  very  bad  of  me  to  be  late,"  she  said.  "I  had  counted 
on  it  that,  for  this  once,  Hugh  would  not  be.  I  hope  Bjorn 
stadt  has  kept  you  amused."  She  paused  there  for  a  glance 
at  him — her  first  since  she  had  entered  the  room — and  added : 
"And  that  he  hasn't  been  flirting  with  you  too  violently.  It's 
a  harmless  weakness  of  his  with  pretty  girls." 


270  AN"   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

He  protested,  with  manifest  amusement,  that  this  injurious 
charge  was  wholly  unfounded.  "I  assure  you,  my  dear  lady, 
that  our  conversation  has  been  decorum  itself ." 

She  cut  him  off  with  a  brusk  nod  and  asked  him  to  ring 
the  bell.  "We  won't  wait  lunch  for  Hugh,"  she  said.  "There 
is  simply  no  telling  when  he'll  come,  since  he's  as  late  as 
this." 

Jean  was,  really,  a  pretty  good  cosmopolite.  She  had  had 
enough  experience  of  the  world  to  have  taken  this  sort  of  situ 
ation  easily  eneugh;  to  understand  that  this  paraded  air  of 
intimacy  between  a  married  woman  and  an  unattached  man 
need  not  necessarily  be  stretched  to  bear  a  sinister  interpre 
tation.  She  didn't  go  the  length  of  so  interpreting  it  to-day ; 
not,  certainly,  in  her  formulated  thoughts.  But  it  embar 
rassed  her  painfully.  She  just  wished  with  all  her  might  that 
she  hadn't  come.  Suppose  Hugh  didn't,  at  all!  And  she 
had  to  sit  through  lunch  with  them  .  .  . 

"He  comes!"  exclaimed  Bjornstadt,  who  stood  where  he 
commanded  a  view  out  the  front  window.  "Mirdbile  dictu,  he 
is  here." 

She  was  amused,  thinking  it  all  over  afterward,  to  realize 
that  once  more,  just  as  so  often  in  the  old  days,  he  had  rescued 
her;  not  by  doing  anything  in  particular — just  by  coming  in 
and  being  Hugh. 

It  was  as  mysterious  as  a  trick  of  legerdemain,  the  way  the 
very  atmosphere  of  the  room  changed  when  he  entered.  His 
greeting  to  Jean  was  practically  all  hand-shake  and  smile; 
both  completely  satisfactory.  He  must  have  said  something, 
of  course,  but  she  wasn't  able  to  remember  what.  Then,  his 
smile  changing  quality  a  little,  amusement  replacing  the  af 
fection  there  had  been  in  it,  he  turned  to  the  other  guest. 

"Count,"  he  said,  "make  a  note  for  your  book  on  America, 
that  men  sometimes  come  home  for  lunch.  Once  in — how 
many  times  is  it? — five?"  And  lastly,  in  a  good-humored 
but  thoroughly  domestic  tone,  he  asked  for  an  exegesis  of  his 
wife's  hat.  "Does  it  mean  that  this  lunch  is  a  party  ?  Or  only 
that  you're  going  out  right  after?  You're  not  taking  Jean, 
I  kope." 


THE   LABORATOBY  271 

"She's  very  welcome  to  come  if  slie  likes,"  said  Helena. 
"Bjornstadt  is  going  to  talk  to  our  Wednesday  class  about 
Free  Trade." 

Jean  took  it  from  that  that  she  needn't  go  unless  sHe  liked, 
and  she  believed  that  if  she  elected  not  to,  Hugh  would  stay 
for  a  while  and  talk  to  her.  She  was  happy  again.  What  a 
silly  she  had  been  to  worry  about  this  Swedish  count — if 
that  was  what  he  was?  Hugh,  being  Hugh,  his  very  same, 
dearly-remembered  self,  was  a  match  for  a  dozen  of  him. 

In  this  suddenly  changed  mood,  she  even  enjoyed  the  lunch, 
though  the  talk,  to  which  she  contributed  ver}r  little,  would 
have  distressed  her  had  not  Hugh — himself  a  listener  most 
of  the  time — been  sitting  there  at  her  left  hand,  taking  it  all 
so  calmly. 

Helena  and  Bjornstadt  discussed  the  war;  but  in  a  set  of 
terms  almost  bewildering  to  Jean.  America  was  responsible 
for  it,  of  course,  Bjornstadt  said,  through  having  begun, 
within  the  last  fifteen  years,  to  export  a  greater  value  of 
fabricated  articles  than  she  had  imported.  She  had  more  than 
built  a  dam.  She  had  turned  back  the  tide.  And  the  result 
was  an  inundation.  So  long  as  America  had  remained  an 
unlimited  reservoir  for  manufactured  products,  there  was 
room  in  the  markets  of  the  world  for  England  and  Germany 
to  go  on  expanding  side  by  side.  Xow  that  the  reservoir  had, 
so  to  speak,  overflowed,  these  two  great  industrial  rivals  must 
fight  it  out  for  survival.  France,  Belgium,  Serbia  and  the 
rest,  were  mere  incidents — pawns  in  the  great  game.  And 
well  within  the  next  hundred  years,  he  noted  calmly,  the  sur 
vivor — whichever  it  happened  to  be — would  fight  it  out  with 
the  United  States  for  the  industrial  empire  of  the  world. 
"All  that,"  he  concluded,  "in  the  absence  of  the  adoption  of 
my  panacea,  Free  Trade." 

Hugh's  remark  at  this  point,  that  the  English  certainly 
stood  committed  to  Free  Trade,  amused  Bjornstadt  very  much. 

"They're  the  cleverest  people  in  the  world,"  he  said,  "at 
giving  their  own  material  advantages  the  labels  of  high  moral 
principles,  and  then  imposing  those  labels  on  the  world.  The 
United  Kingdom  has  what  it  calls  Free  Trade,  yes.  But  the 


273  Atf   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

great  'dominions,  Canada,  Australasia,  the  SoutK  African 
Union,  and  the  colonies  dotted  all  over  the  map,  have  they? 
And  how  can  trade  be  free,  while  Britannia  rules  the  wave; 
controls  all  the  great  trade-routes;  has  the  power  any  morn 
ing  to  say,  this  door  shall  be  shut,  or  that  be  opened  ? 

"Take  your  own  case,  you  Americans.  You  had  dug  your 
Panama  Canal.  But,  when  your  Congress  attempted  to  ex 
empt  your  coastwise  ships  from  the  payment  of  tolls,  your 
president  informed  them  that  he  dared  not  to  do  it.  England 
had  given  orders  to  the  contrary. 

"They're  two  well-matched  antagonists,"  he  said,  referring 
once  more  to  England  and  Germany.  "The  English,  subtle 
but  careless.  The  Germans,  infinitely  patient  and  thorough, 
but  unimaginative.  It  is  interesting  to  speculate  about  the 
outcome,  but  difficult  to  prophesy." 

Helena,  who  had  agreed  with  him  in  explaining  the  whole 
struggle  on  an  economic  or  capitalistic  basis,  was  impatient 
of  his  attempt  to  draw  nationalistic  distinctions.  They  were 
all  alike,  all  over  the  world;  the  capitalist  class,  in  trying 
to  enforce  its  advantages;  the  proletariat  in  submitting  in  a 
dull  blind  resentment  that  would  not  remain  acquiescent  for 
ever  to  its  tyrannies.  She  was  glad  of  the  war  since  it  brought 
the  great  revolution  nearer. 

When  the  cigarettes  came  around,  Jean  hesitated,  then  de 
clined  one,  and,  catching  Hugh's  glance,  she  explained:  "I 
did  over  there,  of  course.  We  all  did.  When  we  came  off 
duty  at  the  hospital, — the  nurses  themselves,  and  we  aids,  too, 
who'd  only  been  washing  up  and  holding  basins  and  things — 
cigarettes  were  more  what  we  needed  than  anything  else.  Even 
the  nuns  in  a  convent  we  used  to  take  supplies  to  in  Belgium, 
had  to  take  to  them.  But  back  home  here,  it's  rather  pleasant 
not  to." 

The  remark  produced  a  rather  electrical  little  silence,  with 
the  realization  it  enforced,  even  on  Helena,  the  least  sensi 
tive  of  the  three,  that  to  the  young  girl,  who  had  sat  through 
all  their  talk  so  quietly,  the  war  meant  something  utterly 
different  from  anything  their  comfortable  philosophy  took  ac 
count  of.  It  meant  blood  sopped  up  in  sponges,  limbs  with 


THE    LABORATORY  273 

the  splintered  ends  of  bone  protruding  through  the  sodden 
flesh;  screams  of  an  unconquerable  agony,  and  Death  coming 
as  a  white  sister  of  mercy.  The  girl  who  had  sat  so  quietly 
listening,  knew  what  this  was  but  the  bare  beginning  and 
routine  of. 

It  was  Helena  who  broke  the  silence.  "It  will  take  you  a 
little  while,  I  suppose,  to  get  used  to  all  this  again.  "We  ought 
to  try  to  make  you  forget." 

Jean  shook  her  head — not  in  dissent,  but  unconsciously,  in 
the  effort  she  had  to  make  to  follow  the  line  her  hostess  had 
taken. 

"That's  grandmother's  idea,"  she  said.  "Prn  to  have  a  very 
gay  season,  beginning  with  a  regular  coming-out  party,  and 
doing  all  the  things  a  debutante  docs,  afterward.  And  Uncle 
Frank  is  finding  me  a  horse,  so  that  I  can  ride  again." 

"That's  what  Hugh  is  always  talking  about,  but  never 
does,"  said  Helena.  "I  wish  you  could  persuade  him  to  do  it. 
If  he  had  you  to  ride  with,  perhaps  he'd  stop  urging  me." 

"You  ought  to  ride,"  Bjornstadt  said  to  Helena.  "If  not 
for  your  selfish  pleasure,  for  the  delight  others  would  take 
in  the  spectacle." 

Helena  said  it  would  be  a  spectacle,  no  doubt  of  that,  and 
vividly  expressed  her  ineradicable  aversion  to  horses.  And 
from  then  on,  until  she  and  the  count  left  the  table,  the  talk 
ran  on  in  this  lighter  vein. 

"I  don't  know  how  long  it  is,"  Hugh  said,  when  he  and 
Jean  were  left  alone — the  question  of  her  going  along  with 
the  other  pair  had  not  been  raised — "since  you  and  I  have 
seen  each  other,  but  somehow  it  doesn't  seenx  as  long  as  it 
must  be." 

"It's  three  years  and  three  months,"  she  informed  him, 
without  any  pause  for  reckoning ;  and  he  laughed.  She  smiled 
contentedly  back  at  him  without  asking  why,  and  added :  "I 
thought  Count  Bjornstadt  was  you,  from  his  hat  being  in  the 
hall,  and  when  I  saw  him,  I  thought  how  could  you  have 
changed  as  much  as  that,  before  I  was  sure  he  was  some  one 
else.  I'd  been  warning  myself, -you  see,  that  you  couldn't 
pos?ibly  not  have  changed  a  good  deal.  That's  how  long  it 


274:  AX    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

seems  to  me.  And  when  you  came  in  and  weren't  changed 
at  all,  you  were  almost  as  surprising  as  the  count  had  been/' 

He  didn't  laugh  at  that,  as  her  tone  had  invited  him  to; 
went  grave  for  an  instant  instead.  "Connie  said  once,"  he 
told  her,  "that  you'd  always  be  the  same.  "Would  never  turn 
into  a  young  lady.  It's  very  nice  to  find  that  she  was  right. 
Of  course,  it's  because  you  arc  the  same  that  it's  hard  to  be 
lieve  such  a  lot  of  time  has  gone  by.  Time — and  other  things. 
"What  you  said  a  little  while  ago  about  not  smoking,  now  you 
were  back  home  again  ...  I  wish  you'd  tell  me  more. 
About  what  you've  been  doing  over  there.  It's  hard  to  under 
stand  how  you  can  have  come  through  that — and  be  like  this.3* 

He  could  see  that  it  was  with  an  effort  that  she  collected 
herself  for  the  recital.  But  before  he  could  withdraw  the  re 
quest,  she  had  begun — a  little  dryly  at  first,  with  a  bare 
chronicle  of  important  facts. 

It  was  not  until  she  began  describing  Paris  to  him,  as  it 
had  been  during  those  days  just  before  the  battle  of  the 
^iarne,  when  the  government  had  moved  to  Bordeaux,  and  all 
who  meant  to  flee  had  fled,  that  she  gave  herself  up,  without 
reservation,  to  the  narrative — began  living  it  for  him  again. 

"There  was  the  most  wonderful  spirit  there  during  those 
days/'  she  said.  "Every  one  you  saw,  on  the  street — any 
where — was  your  friend;  was  like  one  of  your  family;  had  a 
sort  of  bond  with  you  that  nobody  who  wasn't  there  could  have. 
I  don't  know  whether  we  really  believed,  any  of  us,  that  the 
Germans  were  going  to  be  stopped,  but  we  knew  we  meant  to 
see  it  through." 

It  was  during  those  days  that  she  made  friends  and  went  to 
work  with  a  sturdy  young  vicomtesse,  who  was  organizing  a 
relief  for  the  Belgians,  civil  and  military,  in  the  still  defended 
strip  of  that  stricken  country. 

"You  mean  you've  been  under  fire !"  cried  Hugh,  when  she 
described  to  him  how  they  went  in  with  three  motor-ambu 
lances  full  of  supplies  to  a  village  that  had  been  under  bom 
bardment,  and  how,  just  as  they  had  gathered  the  wounded 
together  in  the  little  convent  garden,  the  fire  had  opened 
again;  and  the  struggle  they  had  had  getting  these  helpless 


TEE   LABOR  AT  OEY  275 

ones  into  what  insecure  shelter  there  was ;  the  long  wait  in  the 
dark,  and  then  the  flight  back  after  the  bombardment  had 
thinned  to  the  normal  sprinkling  of  occasional  shells. 

"There  was  always  that,"  she  said,  "in  all  the  places  where 
the  people  were  that  we  were  trying  to  help.  Kothing  ever 
hit  very  close  to  ms.  Yvonne  had  her  ambulance  hit  once, 
when  she  had  four  wounded  soldiers  in  it.  But  she  found  it 
would  still  run  and  drove  straight  along,  not  knowing  whether 
they  had  all  been  killed  or  not.  None  of  them  had  been,  it 
happened. 

"The  hardest  thing  I  ever  did/'  she  said  presentty,  "was  giv 
ing  that  up — that  work.  But  what  mother  was  doing  was  sim 
ply  killing  her.  She  was  in  one  of  the  French  hospitals,  and 
father  said,  when  he  was  ordered  home,  that  we  must  either 
come  with  him,  or  go  back  to  England.  And  Aunt  Christine 
wanted  us,  so  we  went  there.  "We  wont  right  on  working,  of 
course,  but  it  wasn't  so — ghastly.  You  could  get  away  from  it. 
The  English  are  like  that,  you  know,  with  their  'Business  as 
usual/  and  Punch.,  and  Bairnefather." 

When  he  asked,  bluntly,  "Why  did  you  come  home?"  she 
hesitated  over  her  answer. 

"It  was  partly  for  mother/'  she  said  at  last.  "She  couldn't 
stand  it.  I  don't  mean  the  work.  She  could  have  gone  on 
with  that  just  the  way  Aunt  Christine  did — if  father  had  been 
an  English  officer.  Or  if  we'd  gone  into  the  war — after  the 
Lusitania.  Oh,  it  wasn't  the  way  they  treated  us  personally. 
Nor  even  that  they  said  such  very  bitter  things  about  America. 
The  people  who  talked  the  worst  were  the  other  Americans 
over  there.  We  used  to  boil  at  that.  But  our  friends — -Eng- 
lish  friends — were  just  puzzled.  They  wanted  n6  to  tell  them 
why  we  took  it  like  that.  And,  of  course,  we  couldn't.  Be 
cause  we  were  as  puzzled  as  they.  It  was  a  feeling  you  might 
call — homesickness,  that  really  was  too  muck  for  mother. 
That  on  top  of  all  the  rest.  I  think  she'd  have  collapsed 
altogether,  if  I  hadn't  brought  her  home. 

"It  isn't  fair,  though," — this,  after  a  little  pause — "to  put 
it  all  off  on  her.  Because  it  got  me  in  just  the  gam«  way. 
I  felt  as  if  I  couldn't  endure  it,  not  to  come  back — here  to 


276  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

Chicago-^— wliere  the  people  I  knew  and  loved  were — and  learn 
to  see — what  it  was  they  saw.  I  thought  if  I  could  just  talk 
with  you — have  you  explain  it  all  to  me,  then  it  would  all 
come  straight." 

Her  emphasis  on  the  pronoun  made  it  impossible  to  believe 
that  she  had  used  it  in  any  but  the  singular,  personal  sense. 
His  "With  me!"  was  not  a  question,  but  a  mere  cry  of  sur 
prise  ;  almost  of  consternation,  one  might  have  said. 

She  nodded.  "You've  always  understood  things,  better 
than  any  one  else  I  know.  And  you're  not  a  selfish  mercenary 
monster" — her  inflection  was  humorous,  but  the  affectionate, 
contented  warmth  in  her  voice  made  of  every  ugly  epithet 
almost  a  caress — "and.  you're  not  a  hypocrite,  pretending  to 
be  very  noble  because  he's  really  afraid.  Nor  any  of  the  things 
they  say  we  are.  You're — Hugh.  Mother  laughed  at  me  the 
other  night  for  saying  that  when  you'd  told  me,  I'd  know ;  but 
it's  true.  When  I  can  see  what  you  see,  then  I'll  be  contented 
to  wait — for  what  you're  waiting  for.  That's — really — why 
I've  come  home." 

It  was  so  long  before  he  made  her  any  answer  at  all — just 
sat  there  with  his  gaze  focussed  upon  his  empty  coffee-cup — 
that  at  last,  in  a  troubled  voice,  she  prompted  him. 

"If  it's  something  you're — afraid  that  I  wouldn't  like  to 
hear,  something  that  you  think  will  hurt  me  .  .  ." 

"No,  it's  not  that,"  he  told  her.  "It's  that  you  have  come 
to  the  wrong  person.  I  don't  know  what  to  say  to  you.  I 
haven't  thought  it  through." 

"You  haven't  thought  I"  There  was  simple  incredulity  in 
that  almost  voiceless  echo. 

"At  least  I've  tried  not  to  think.  I've  tried,  as  well  as  I 
could,  to  let  it  alone." 

There  were  a  good  many  silences  as  he  went  on,  but  not 
one  of  them  did  the  girl  break  in  upon. 

"Most  men,  I  suppose — outside  the  really  great  ones — 
come  to  the  point  sometime,  where  they  acquiesce  in  their 
limitations.  It's  just  age,  or  indolence,  that  brings  some  to 
that,  and  they  come  to  it  so  gradually  they  don't  know  they've 


THE   LABORATORY  277 

done  it.  But  a  man  may  be  brought  to  it — the  way  I  was — by 
an  experience,  or  a  set  of  experiences,  so  that  it's  a  more 
dramatic  recognizable  thing;  so  that  he  goes  inside  some  sort 
of  fence,  once  for  all.  Says  to  himself:  'I'm  all  right  so 
long  as  I  stay  in  here.  Here's  where  I  belong.'  There's  a 
certain  sort  of  thing  that  I  seem  to  be  able  to  understand — • 
get  at  the  truth  about.  Not  living  things ;  inorganic  things — • 
metals.  It  makes  more  of  a  world  than  you'd  think,  even 
the  small  sector  of  it  I  have  marked  off  for  myself — a  world  I 
won't  live  long  enough  to  explore  anywhere  near  to  the  end  of, 
if  I  go  on  till  I'm  a  hundred. 

"When  the  war  broke,  I  said :  'That's  another  of  the  things 
that's  outside  my  fence/  just  as  I'd  found  that  sociology  and 
politics  were  outside  my  fence ;  just  as  the  big  strike  we  had 
out  at  Riverdale  was,  only  immensely  more  so.  I  could  keep 
out  of  it,  even  if  I  couldn't  altogether  keep  it  out  of  me. 

"I  had  to  get  some  sort  of  working  basis  toward  it,  of  course. 
I've  tried  to  say  that  my  own  personal  feelings  didn't  count. 
I  was  an  American  of  Scotch  and  English  blood — nothing  else, 
so  far  as  I  know — and  we've  been  here  since  the  Revolution; 
but  that  didn't  make  me  any  more  truly  an  American  than 
my  polisher,  Sehultz,  out  at  the  laboratory — or  than  my  friend 
Bausch,  at  the  University.  Bausch  had  his  argument.  I,  if 
I  wanted  to  argue,  had  mine.  And,  in  both  cases — I  could  see 
it  plainly  enough  in  his,  and  he,  I  suppose,  could  see  it  plainly 
enough  in  mine — the  line  of  that  argument  wouldn't  be  de 
termined  by  any  pure  reasoning  faculty  we  had,  but  by  what 
Rodney  Aldrich  speaks  of  as  our  visceral  sensations.  Bausch 
is  an  American.  Perley,  his  assistant,  is  a  Sassenach-hating 
Irishman,  and  he's  an  American.  My  wife's  half  Hungarian- 
Jew,  half  Pole,  and  she's  an  American. 

"So,  I've  said,  the  America  of  the  school-books,  doesn't,  just 
now,  exist.  It  has  in  the  past,  and  it  will,  I  suppose,  again. 
All  the  nations — even  the  greatest — have  had  phases  like  that. 
All  we  are  now  is  an  agglomerate  of  individuals  and  groups. 
We'll  get  into  something,  sometime  perhaps,  like  the  arc  of 
one  of  my  electric  furnaces,  that  will  burn  everything  out  of 


278  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

us  that  won't  fuse  into  one  national  consciousness.  I  waited 
for  a  while — 'watchfully* — to  see  whether  it  wasn't  coming; 
but  it  seems  it's  not.  Not  for  a  while.  Anyhow — I've  said — 
it's  no  concern  of  mine." 

That,  evidently,  was  the  end.    And  still  she  did  not  speak. 

""Not  much  to  have  come  home  for,  was  it?"  he  said  with  a 
rueful  sort  of  smile. 

"Well,  it'B  something"  she  said.  "Something  I  hadn't 
thought  of." 

"Jeaa,"  he  asked  suddenly,  "when  was  three  years  and  three 
months  age?" 

"It  was  the  day  jour  grandfather  died,"  she  told  him,  her 
color  brightening  a  little  as  she  spoke.  "We  spent  the  morn 
ing  down  on  the  beach  at  Lake  Forest,  building  a  sand-castle. 
You  wouldn't  remember  it,  but  I  do.  f  told  you  some  of  my 
troubles,  and  you  helped — a  lot.  The  telephone  message  about 
old  Mr.  Corbett  came  in  right  after  lunch." 

"Not  remember !"  he  echoed,  with  a  curious  smile  that  filled 
her,  for  an  instant,  with  the  panicky  fear  that  she  might  cry. 
"Yes,  I  remember  very  well.  Three  years  and  three  months ! 
And  that  was  the  man  you  came  back  to  talk  to  I  You  will 
wonder,  when  you  get  home,  whether  Bjornstadt  wasn't  really 
that  maa,  after  all.  He's  fully  as  like  him  as  I  am." 

"You've  not  changed,"  said  Jean  confidently.  "It's  only- 
tilings  that  have.  I  must  go.  I've  stayed  hours.  But- 
sometime,  will  you  take  me  to  see  your  laboratory  ?" 

Hugh  nodded.    "I'd  like  to  do  that,"  he  said. 

Taking  leave  of  her  at  the  door,  he  asked:  "If  I  get  a 
horse,  will  you  really  ride  with  me  ? — Mornings,  before  break 
fast?" 

"Yes/'  she  said. 


CHAPTER  XXI 

"It  /T  OTHER  !"  Constance  exclaimed.  "Here !— At  eleven 
\/ 1  o'clock  Sunday  morning  I" 

«*•  »  -*.  She  had  come  down  to  her  sitting-room  from  a  visit 
to  the  nursery,  to  find  Mrs.  Corbett  planted,  with  every  effect 
of  permanency,  in  a  big  armchair.  This  was  along  in  No 
vember,  three  or  four  weeks  after  Helena's  lunch. 

"I  thought  I  recognized  the  cigarette  out  in  the  hall/'  Con 
stance  continued,  "but  I  couldn't  believe  it  could  be  you." 

"I  parted  from  your  father  at  the  church-door,"  Mrs.  Cor 
bett  said.  "I  started  out,  right  enough,  but  I  had  a  change  of 
heart.  He  wasn't  left  solitary.  Greg  and  his  wife  were  along. 
They'd  called  for  us.  And  they  all  looked  so  much  more  re 
ligious  than  I  felt,  that  I  came  on  and  took  a  chance  on  finding 
you.  I'm  glad  I  did.  I  haven't  seen  you  for  a  dog's  age." 

"Well,"  Constance  demurred  with  a  smile,  "yesterday,  for 
a  minute.  And  at  dinner  Thursday  night." 

With  a  brusk  exhalation  of  a  cloud  of  smoke,  Mrs.  Cor 
bett  dismissed  these  instances  of  her  daughter's  as  trivial. 
"Oh,  I  knew  you  were  still  here— or  hereabouts,"  she  said. 
"But  what  I  wanted  was  a  chance  to  stretch  my  legs  and  go 
over  things  a  bit  with  you.  You're  not  just  running  off  any 
where,  are  you  ?  Nor  expecting  anybody  to  come  running  in  ? 
Where's  Frank?" 

"Gone  to  church,"  said  Constance.  "He  took  Philip"  (this 
was  their  nine-year-old)  "and  went  round  for  his  mother  and 
Ethel." 

"It's  the  men,  with  us,  who  do  most  of  the  religion,  isn't 
it?"  commented  Mrs.  Corbett;  " — your  father  and  Greg  and 
Frank.  It's  odd  about  Gregory,"  she  added.  "I  wouldn't 
have  expected  it  to  take  him  that  way ;  especially  since  Eileen, 
up  to  the  time  he  married  her,  was  what  your  grandfather 

279 


280  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

would  have  called  a  Free  Thinker.  Of  course  that  meant 
nothing  with  her.  Any  man  she  married  she'd  swallow  whole. 
The  puzzle  is,  why  did  marrying  her  make  Greg  religious?" 

"Well,  you  never  can  tell/3  said  Constance.  The  domestic 
nature  of  the  occupation  she  had  found  for  herself  on  settling 
down  for  her  mother's  visit,  may  be  charged  with  the  sterility 
of  this  repty. 

Evidently  Mrs.  Corbett  thought  so,  for  she  observed: 
"That's  about  the  sort  of  thing  you'd  expect  a  woman  darning 
socks,  to  say.  You  can  tell  sometimes." 

Constance  nodded  and  allowed  the  sock  with  the  darning- 
egg  in  it  to  drop  in  her  lap.  "Poor  old  Hugh,"  she  sighed. 

"The  last  time  he  dropped  in  on  us,"  her  mother  said,  after 
a  ruminative  silence,  " — it  must  have  been  a  month  ago — I 
didn't  know  whether  to  cry  or  swear;  did  both,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  after  he'd  gone.  He  was  like  a  ghost.  I  don't  mean 
pale.  He's  well  enough  as  far  as  that  goes.  Like  somebody,  I 
mean,  come  back  for  an  hour  from  a  long  way  off,  looking  on. 
Fond  of  us  as  ever,  of  course — more  so,  for  that  matter.  He 
never  used  to  be  especially  affectionate,  and  he  is  now.  And 
interested,  in  a  way,  in  the  things  we  were  doing  and  talking 
about.  But  just  as  a  ghost  would  be,  who'd  have  to  go  back 
in  an  hour  or  so,  to  another  world — or  hell,  of  his  own,  that 
he  couldn't  tell  us  anything  about.  I  was  bilious  that  day,  and 
I  suppose  I  exaggerated.  But  I  didn't  make  it  up  out  of 
whole  cloth." 

"No,"  Constance  agreed.  "He's  like  that  when  he  comes 
here.  Not  tragic,  though.  The  children  simply  adore  him." 

"Of  course  not !  He's  not  a  fool.  It  would  be  better  for 
him  if  he  were — a  bit  of  one.  If  he  hadn't  brains  enough  to 
see  through  her.  .  .  He  did  that,  Fm  sure,  years  ago.  Or 
if  he  had  Greg's  temper  to  frighten  her  with  now  and  then ;  or 
Bob's  selfishness  to  keep  her  worried.  The  devil  of  it  is,  she 
couldn't  have  got  either  of  them  in  a  thousand  years.  It  had 
to  be  just  Hugh." 

"Oh,  I  know;  it  isn't  fair,"  Constance  agreed. 

"I  suppose  we  weren't  any  too  wise,"  the  older  woman  re 
flected,  "but  I  don't  know  just  what  we  could  have  done.  You 


THE    LABORATORY  281 

separate  two  people  like  that,  and  you  find  that  ahsence  makes 
the  heart  grow  fonder.  Or,  you  throw  'em.  together,  and  they 
don't  sicken  of  it  as  you  meant  them  to.  What  we  tried  was 
a  little  of  both.  Oh,  I  suppose  it  was  hopeless  from  the  start. 
Poor  Hugh !  That's  about  all  there  is  to  say." 

None  of  this  was  new  ground,  and  both  women  had  been 
talking  and  listening  a  little  absently.  But  what  Constance 
said  now,  had  a  sharper  edge,  and  Mrs.  Corbett's  manner  be 
came  less  reflective  and  more  alert  as  she  heard  it. 

"I  wouldn't  dare  let  Jean  hear  us  talking  like  this." 

"Do  you  happen  to  know  where  Jean  is  this  morning?" 
The  older  woman's  question  did  not  sound  quite  as  casual  as 
the  substance  of  it  indicated. 

"Why,  I  think  she's  gone  off  somewhere  with  Carter/'  Con 
stance  said.  "I  called  her  up  last  night  to  see  if  she  was 
coming  in  to  lunch  to-day,  and  she  said  she  didn't  think  she'd 
better  promise,  because  he  was  taking  her  for  a  drive  out  into 
the  country,  and  she  didn't  know  whether  they'd  be  back." 

"That's  it,  then,"  Mrs.  Corbett  said.  "He'd  had  his  break 
fast  and  gone  off  in  a  great  fume  long  before  we  were  down. 
But  I  didn't  know  whether  it  was  because  she  was  going  some 
where  with  him — or  because  she  wasn't." 

"Well,  she  was;  this  time." 

A  moderately  sensitive  ear  might  have  heard  a  slight  stress, 
both  in  the  mother's  speech  and  in  her  daughter's,  which  made 
the  alternative  which  had  not  eventuated,  into  more  than  a 
negative  thing. 

Mrs.  Corbett  lighted  a  fresh  cigarette,  and  settled  back  into 
her  chair  a  little  more  comfortably.  "It's  being  a  wonderful 
experience  for  Carter;  finding  a  girl  who  won't  come  at  his 
whistle.  They  won't  even  give  him  time  to  whistle — most  of 
them.  If  I'd  wanted  to  marry  him  off,  I'd  have  given  a  tip, 
to  some  one  of  the  half  dozen,  to  hold  off  a  little." 

"Oh,  they  don't  need  tips,"  said  Constance.  "They  know, 
well  enough;  only  the  poor  little  things  can't  help  it.  They 
make  their  plans  and  resolutions,  but  the  sight  of  him's  too 
much  for  them,  and  they  all  come  fluttering  round  just  the 


A!ST    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

"How  is  it  that  Jean  keeps  her  head?"  Mrs.  Corbett  fol 
lowed  that  question  with  a  look. 

"Why,  that's  natural  enough,  mother.  When  you  think 
where  she's  heen,  this  last  year — what  she's  been  through.  All 
you  have  to  do  is  look  at  Ethel  and  talk  to  her — see  what  it's 
done  to  her — and  then  remember  that  Jean's  been  having  the 
same  experiences.  You  can't  wonder  that  she  isn't  so  very 
excited  about  dance  teas  and  silly  suppers  at  the  Casino,  and 
amateur  movies;  nor  very  thrilled  over  Carter,  either.  I 
think  it's  natural  that  she  likes — older  people  better,  just 
now.  If  Carter  had  good  sense,  he'd  stop  being  so  solemn  and 
intense  and  proprietary  about  her ;  go  in  for  being  comfortable 
and  brotherly.  That  sort  of  thing  would  bring  her  round 
before  very  long — I'm  sure.  I  wish  he'd  see  it." 

"What  does  she  say  about  Hugh?"  Mrs.  Corbett  asked, 
after  a  nod  of  agreement  and  a  thoughtful  inhalation  of  smoke. 
"She  knows  more  about  that  menage  than  any  of  the  rest  of  us, 
certainly.  Doesn't  she  think  he's  to  be  pitied?  Or,  does  she 
want  to  do  it  all  herself  ? 

"I  take  that  back!"  she  added  hastily.  "Shouldn't  have 
said  it.  That's  just  the  eternal  feline,  Connie.  The  child  is 
all  right,  of  course.  What  does  she  say?" 

"Oh,  just  as  you  guessed  first;  that  he  isn't  to  be  pitied. 
She  never  said  anything  to  me  but  once,  and  that  was  when 
she  was  indignant  over  something  Carter  had  said — she  didn't 
quote  it — about  Hugh.  She  said  the  people  who  treated  him 
as  if  he  had  made  a  failure  of  his  life  were  mistaken.  She 
said  she  was  sure  he  didn't  feel  that  way  about  it  himself,  and 
that  he'd  be  certain  to,  if  he  had.  Might  even,  well  enough, 
if  he  hadn't. 

"I  didn't  ask  her  what  she  thought  of  his  marriage ;  because, 
after  all,  that  speaks  for  itself.  She  wouldn't  go  to  their 
house  if  she  didn't  like  Helena.  And  she'd  hate  her  if  she 
thought  she  was  treating  Hugh  badly. 

"I've  wondered  since,"  Constance  went  on,  "if  she  could  be 
right.  I  suppose  the  whole  thing  we  see,  might  just  be  self- 
consciousness,  coming  from  the  rows — over  the  business  as  well 


THE   LABORATORY  283 

as  over  Helena — and  making  us  all  see  things  that  aren't 
there." 

"Self-consciousness !"  fumed  the  older  woman.  "Is  it  self- 
consciousness  that  he  hasn't  any  children?  Or  that  he  lives 
like  a  hermit  all  of  his  days,  and  half  his  nights,  in  that  labo 
ratory  of  his?  Or  his  wife's  goings  on  with  one  man  after 
another — poets  and  foreigners  and  such?  What  does  she 
mean,  do  you  suppose,  throwing  that  child  at  Hugh's  head  the 
way  she's  been  doing  ?  It  isn't  like  anything  we've  ever  known 
of  her.  Constance,  why  doesn't  the  child's  grandmother  put 
her  foot  down  on  that  ?  I  don't  understand  it.  Do  you  ?" 

"I  think  so,"  said  Constance.  "Admitting,  that  is,  that 
there  is  anything  for  her  to  put  her  foot  on — and  I  don't  think 
there  is,  really.  What  worries  Mother  Crawford  is  the  fear 
that  Jean  will  rush  off  and  marry  somebody  before  this  win 
ter's  half  over.  Carter — or  anybody.  She  doesn't  want  her 
to.  She  wants  Jean  to  play  with  for  a  while.  You  can't 
blame  her,  really.  And  any  interest  the  child  takes  in — in- 
eligibles — so  long  as  there's  nothing  for  people  to  talk  about — 
and  there  isn't,  of  course — is  so  much  to  the  good." 

"Oh,  I  suppose  it's  just  that  I'm  getting  suspicious  with 
age ;  like  an  old  mule,"  her  mother  said,  getting  ready  to  get 
up  to  go.  "Only  I  wish  that  that  pair  of  children  would  come 
home  from  their  ride  and  tell  us  they  were  engaged." 

It  had,  upon  them  both,  something  of  the  startling  effect  of 
a  stage-trick  when,  pat  upon  her  words,  almost,  the  "pair  of 
children"  came  in. 

But  the  part  of  Mrs.  Corbett's  wish  that  really  was  the 
whole  of  it,  was  evidently  not  to  be  fulfilled.  Whatever  else 
might  have  happened  during  that  drive,  Jean  and  Carter  had 
not  engaged  themselves  to  marry.  Indeed,  their  manners  were 
so  good  that  Constance  was,  for  a  while,  in  doubt  whether 
anything  had  happened  at  all.  Without  any  undue  insistence 
upon  their  explanation,  they  accounted  for  their  unexpectedly 
early  return,  by  the  Sunday  crowds  in  the  highways.  It  was 
as  bad  as  summer;  no  possibility  of  anything  but  plodding 
along  in  a  smoke-smothered  procession.  Jean  inquired  if  her 


AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

invitation  to  lunch,  here  at  Constance's,  still  held  good,  and 
Carter,  having  observed  that  his  mother  was  on  the  point  of 
going,  urged  her  to  let  him  drive  her  home.  Then  every  one 
would  think  they'd  both  been  to  church,  he  said.  You  had  to 
know  the  color  and  shape  of  Carter's  roadster  to  appreciate 
this  joke.  His  mother  grinned  at  it  and,  to  his  surprise,  said 
she'd  go  with  him;  adding  that  she  only  hoped  her  husband 
would  be  where  he  could  see  her  coming  up  to  the  door. 

It  was  the  way  Jean's  eyes  kept  seeking  out  the  boy's  face, 
that  directed  Constance's  observation  to  the  fact  that  he  had 
gone  pale,  now  that  the  flush  of  the  wind  had  left  his  face. 
And  the  suspicion  this  phenomenon  awakened  was  confirmed 
by  the  way  the  girl  took  leave  of  him. 

She  said,  evenly  enough,  to  be  sure,  but  in  a  voice  colored 
beyond  disguise  by  a  strong  emotion,  "It  was  a  lovely  drive, 
anyway.  Thank  you — for  asking  me."  She  held  out  her 
hand  to  him  and  after  a  perceptible  hesitation,  he  took  it. 

That  made  it  all  as  plain  as  print.  Carter  had  asked  and 
been  refused.  And  there  had  been  no  half-tones  about  the 
refusal,  either;  no  uncertainties  nor  pleas  for  time.  That 
note  of  affectionate  deprecation  would  never  have  got  into  her 
voice  if  there  had  been  the  slightest  chance  for  him. 

"Better  luck  next  time/'  he  told  her  blithely;  and  went 
away  with  his  mother. 

There  was  a  little  silence  after  they'd  gone,  then  Jean 
asked :  "How  long  is  it  till  lunch?  Have  we  five  minutes  be 
fore  the  others  will  be  coming  in?  I  want  to  ask  you  some 
thing." 

"Come  up  to  my  room  and  take  off  your  hat,"  Constance 
suggested.  "I'll  go  along.  Then  it  won't  matter  if  they  do 
come  in." 

"Oh,  it's  not  as  bad  as  that,"  said  Jean.  "Still,  I  suppose  I 
am  blown  away,  rather." 

She  had  stood  before  Constance's  mirror  two  or  three  min 
utes,  busy  with  minor  improvements,  when  Constance  prompt 
ed  her  by  saying :  "Ask  away." 

"I  ought  to  have  done  it  down-stairs,"  Jean  said.   "It's  got 


THE   LABORATORY  285 

too  important  already.  Why,  it's  just  this:  oughtn't  I  to 
ride  with  Hugh,  mornings,  the  way  we've  been  doing?" 

Constance  was  a  little  startled,  the  question  came  so  pat  on 
what  she  and  her  mother  had  been  talking  about. 

"What  put  that  idea  into  your  head  ?"  she  asked. 

"It  was  put  there,"  said  Jean,  "that's  the  point.  I  mean,  it 
didn't  come  there  by  itself/' 

"By  your  mother  ?"  Constance  asked. 

And  Jean's  "No !"  had  so  much  surprise  in  it  that  she  went 
on  to  explain.  "Of  course  if  mother  felt  anything  like  that, 
why — that  would  be  the  end  of  it.  I  mean  of  the  riding.  I 
wouldn't  ask  anybody  else. 

"All  mother  ever  did,"  she  went  on,  "was  to  warn  me,  the 
night  we  came  home,  against  falling  in  love  with  him  again — 
the  way  I  did  when  I  was  a  little  girl.  And  I  haven't  done 
that." 

There  was  such  perfect  candid  conviction  in  the  girl's  face 
and  voice,  that  Constance  laughed. 

"Why,  it  isn't  the  sort  of  thing  people  would  talk  about," 
she  said.  "I  mean,  socially  it's  correct  enough.  So  what  it 
comes  down  to  is  what  Helena  thinks  about  it.  If  she  ob 
jected  to  it,  or  even  if  there  was  anything  to  give  you  the  idea 
she  didn't  like  it  much,  why,  I'd  stop." 

"Well,  that's  what  I  thought,"  said  Jean.  "It  was  her  own 
idea,  you  see.  She  doesn't  like  to  ride,  and  Hugh  had  been 
urging  her  to — for  company.  And  she  said — why  not  me? 
Oh,  and  she  meant  it,  you  could  tell !" 

A  flash  of  her  mother's  uneasiness  came  over  Constance. 
"Do  you  like  her,  Jean  ?"  she  asked  bluntly. 

The  girl  nodded.  "I  suppose  it's  because  he  does  that  I 
do,  really,"  she  said.  "There  were  a  few  minutes,  the  first 
day  I  went  to  their  house,  before  I  knew  he  did,  when  I  hated 
her.  But  I  have  felt  awfully  silly  about  that  since.  I  think 
she's  awfully  fond  of  him,  and  I'm  sure  he  is  of  her.  They  do 
it  their  own  way,  of  course;  but  then,  aren't  people  en 
titled  to?" 

There  was  one  more  question  Constance  wanted  to  ask. 


286  AN"   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

But  it  was  a  flagrant  impertinence,  and  she  did  not.  Wai 
it  Carter  who  had  put  that  notion  into  Jean's  head  ?  She  felt 
pretty  sure  of  the  answer. 

Coming  down-stairs  together,  they  met  Frank  and  his  boy 
bringing  Hugh  in  for  lunch. 

"We  found  this  man  in  church,  of  all  places!"  Crawford 
explained.  "And  Phil  captured  him  single-handed  and 
brought  him  along.  Why,  hello,  Jean !  I  thought  you  weren't 
coming/' 

It  was  obvious — demonstrable — that  there  was  no  pre- 
arrangement  in  this  meeting  between  Jean  and  Hugh.  Con 
stance  was  hotly  indignant  with  herself  for  having  let  the 
fleeting  shadow  of  that  thought  cross  her  mind.  It  only  showed 
what  a  mean,  suspicious,  ornery  sort  of  mind  she  had. 

It  was  in  the  reaction  from  this  feeling  that  she  watched 
her  brother  all  through  lunch.  He  sat  between  the  two  little 
boys,  Philip  and  Francis,  and  they  pretty  well  monopolized 
him.  How  he  would  have  loved  to  have  some  like  that  for 
his  own!  He  was  defrauded  there,  anyhow — whatever  Jean 
might  say.  Only  perhaps  it  wasn't  Helena's  fault.  None  of 
them  were  enough  in  her  confidence  to  know.  He  had  had  a 
lonely  time. 

The  undisguised  pleasure  that  had  lighted  his  face  at  sight 
of  Jean,  had  troubled  Constance  for  a  moment  even  while  it 
had  warmed  her  heart  to  him.  The  trouble  went  away, 
though,  and  the  warmth  remained.  If  the  girl  could  give  him 
an  hour,  now  and  then,  of  unalloyed  happiness — why  not? 
That  consideration  governed  her  attitude  toward  a  project  that 
came  up  while  they  were  still  at  lunch. 

Frank  had  said,  down  the  table  to  Hugh,  "I  didn't  know  you 
knocked  off  work  at  the  laboratory  on  Sundays,"  and  Hugh's 
answer  had  been  that  he  didn't — because  they  were  Sundays. 
"Taylor  and  Brigham  and  Schultz  are  all  out  there  now,  busy 
as  bees.  They  do  all  the  hard  work.  I'm  lazy.  I  only  turn 
up  when  things  are  getting  exciting." 

This  drew  a  running  fire  of  the  sort  of  jokes  that  always 
are  provoked  by  such  a  remark;  about  how  they  were  begin 
ning  to  learn  the  truth  at  last,  and  what  a  convenient  thing  a 


THE    LABORATORY  28? 

fortified  mystery  like  a  laboratory  must  be.  As  good  as  a 
Bluebeard's  chamber. 

Jean  asked,  "Has  any  one  ever  seen  it?  I  asked  to,  ever 
so  long  ago,  but  I've  never  been  taken." 

"There's  no  time  like  the  present,"  Hugh  said  promptly. 
"We'll  go  this  afternoon.  As  many  as  like,"  he  went  on  in 
answer  to  Frank's  "All  of  us?"  But  Frank  had  not  asked 
this  seriously.  He  was  already  committed,  as  his  two  sons 
vociferously  reminded  him,  to  another  expedition  that  after 
noon. 

Constance,  though,  happened  to  be  free  till  tea  time,  and 
had  to  make  up  her  mind  whether  to  go  or  not.  She  wanted 
to  see  the  place,  quite  apart  from  the  consideration  of  Mrs. 
Grundy,  but  that  old  maternal  feeling  of  hers,  which  she  had 
never  lost  for  Hugh,  and  which  was  stronger  than  ever  in 
her  to-day,  led  her  to  plead  letters  to  write.  The  "Have  a  good 
time,"  with  which  she  despatched  the  pair,  amounted  to  a 
blessing. 

They  set  off  afoot,  since  it  was  not  more  than  a  mile  to  the 
laboratory,  and  a  walk  was  just  what  they  agreed  they  wanted. 
A  walk — out  West  Chicago  Avenue! 


CHAPTER  XXII 

HE  had  mentioned  at  lunch  where  Helena  was  that  day — 
down  at  her  laboratory,  the  Drama  Shop,  where  they 
were  putting  through  the  dress  rehearsals  for  a  bill  of 
one-act  plays  that  were  to  be  presented  the  next  night.  So 
there  was  no  question  of  her  going  with  them  this  afternoon. 

But  Jean  said,  just  after  they  had  left  the  Crawfords' 
house :  "Do  you  suppose  Helena  had  rather  we  waited  until 
she  could  go,  too?  Because  we  can  do  anything  else;  just 
walk/' 

"No,"  he  said,  "it's  no  treat  for  Helena.  She's  been  there 
dozens  of  times.  She  goes  there,"  he  went  on  reflectively, 
"about  the  way  I  sometimes  go  to  church.  Not  understanding, 
a  bit,  what  it's  all  about,  but  getting  a  sort  of  wonder  out  of 
it;  especially  when  she's  a  bit  low  in  her  mind.  A  big  bare 
copper  bar,  for  instance,  as  thick  as  my  arm,  that  you  can  put 
your  hand  on — it  feels  perfectly  cool  and  dead — and  yet  it's 
got  enougli  electricity  going  through  it  to  burn  you  to  a  cinder 
if  you  got  in  the  way  of  it.  You  can  see  a  pot  of  steel  boiling 
like  water  in  the  white  arc  it  makes.  That  sort  of  thing." 

"Is  that  why  you  went  to  church  to-day  ?"  she  asked.  "Be 
cause  you  were  low  in  your  mind  ?" 

"Not  a  bit,"  he  said.  "To-day  I  was  following  the  line  of 
least  resistance.  When  Helena  found  me  this  morning  with  a 
day  off  that  didn't  coincide  with  hers,  she  packed  me  off  to 
find  you.  By  the  way,  she  wants  me  to  bring  you  to  supper 
to-night  if  you  can  come.  I  went  over  to  your  apartment  and 
was  told  that  you  were  off  driving  with  Carter  and  that  your 
mother  and  Mrs.  Crawford  had  gone  to  church.  It  was  ob 
vious  that  I  couldn't  follow  you  so  I  followed  them." 

At  that  she  gave  up  as  something  there  was  no  use  trying 
any  longer — for  the  present,  at  least — to  account  for,  the  no- 

288 


THE   LABOR  AT  OEY  380 

tion  that  he  dreaded  a  little  taking  her  out  to  the  laboratory. 
She  had  become  aware  of  it  the  moment  she  asked,  there  at 
the  lunch  table.  It  hadn't  anything  to  do  with  Helena,  so 
much  was  clear.  And  it  didn't  relate  to  any  special  state  of 
mind  he  was  in  to-day.  Well,  she  wouldn't  fuss  about  it; 
would  go  along  as  if  she  hadn't  noticed  any  more  than  ho 
had  meant  her  to.  It's  a  poor  sort  of  friend  that  insists  on 
being  too  penetrating — and  on  showing  how  penetrating  he  is, 

Silences  were  of  course  a  part  of  their  conversation.  His 
omission  to  comment  upon  or  to  inquire  about  her  truncated 
excursion  with  Carter  told  her,  plainly  enough,  that  he  sus 
pected  an  emotional  crisis  somewhere  in  the  neighborhood. 
And  she  felt  pretty  sure  that  by  not  mentioning  it  herself  she 
was  giving  him  a  strong  inkling  of  what  had  happened.  But 
that  couldn't  be  called  violating  a  confidence,  could  it  ?  Any 
how,  it  was  all  very  comfortable  and  pleasant. 

Almost  any  sort  of  laboratory  will  give  a  layman,  who  has 
been  brought  to  see  its  wonders,  a  disappointing  surprise  for  a 
first  impression.  He  has  anticipated  something  entirely  mys 
terious,  just  as  the  sensation-seeker  in  a  notorious  cabaret  hag 
anticipated  something  entirely  disreputable,  and  is  shocked  to 
find  most  of  the  patrons  sober  and  decorous  enough  to  pass 
muster  anywhere. 

The  first  room  Hugh  took  Jean  into,  in  the  ordinary  three- 
story  red  brick  building  whose  street  door  he  unlocked,  had 
the  same  sort  of  machinery  in  it  that  she  had  seen  in  the 
shops  at  Eiverdale.  (She  had  seen  Biverdale  thoroughly. 
Gregory,  who  had  taken  a  sudden  warm  liking  for  the  girl, 
since  her  return  from  England,  had  collaborated  with  Carter 
in  the  personal  conduct  of  her  excursion  through  as  much  of 
it  as  she  could  see  in  an  arduous  day;  a  sight  well  worth 
the  labor,  it  may  be  mentioned,  for  the  huge,  thoroughly  mod 
ernized  plant  was  taxed  to  its  utmost  capacity  by  floods  of 
war  orders,  running  nights  and  Sundays,  and  paying  a  scale 
of  wages  that  Gregory  would  have  regarded,  two  years  before, 
as  fantastic.)  Only,  at  Eiverdale,  each  of  these  prosaic  ma 
chines  had  gained  a  dignity,  through  being  repeated,  through 


290  AN  AMERICAN   FAMILY 

a  vanishing  perspective,  down  endless  aisles.  In  this  little 
room,  they  were  all  cluttered  up — meanly.  It  might  have  been 
the  repair  shop  to  a  garage. 

Hugh  saw  her  trying  to  look  interested,  and  laughed  at 
her.  "Not  much,  compared  to  Gregory's  lay-out,  is  it?"  he 
commented,  hut  without  any  ironic  implications ;  nothing  but 
pure  amusement,  in  his  voice.  So  she  laughed  too,  content 
edly,  at  herself,  and  followed  him  through  into  another  room 
that  took  up  the  rest  of  the  ground  floor. 

"These  are  all  testing-machines  of  one  kind  and  another," 
he  said;  and  walked  over  to  the  only  one  of  them  that  was 
running.  "That's  doing  pretty  well,"  he  observed,  after  a 
glance  at  an  instrument  which  looked  like  an  automobile 
speedometer.  "It's  a  fatigue-test,"  he  explained.  "We're 
trying  to  tire  out  that  little  shaft  of  metal  turning  round  in 
there  with  the  weight  hung  on  the  end  of  it.  When  it  breaks, 
the  machine  will  stop,  and  a  look  at  the  revolution  counter  will 
tell  us  how  long  it  lasted." 

"I  didn't  know  that  metals  got  tired,"  Jean  said.  "Do 
they  all?" 

He  nodded  and  turned  from  the  machine,  which  was  an 
ordinary-looking  lathe,  only  with  a  few  trimmings,  to  another, 
more  mysterious — with  more  the  laboratory  look. 

"Here's  the  classic  test,"  he  said.  "It's  for  tensile  strength ; 
how  much  pull  a  thing  will  stand  before  it  pulls  apart.  The 
interesting  thing  about  that  machine  is  the  way  we  measure 
the  amount  of  pull  we  put  on  the  piece  we're  testing.  We 
fasten  the  piece  to  one  end  of  that  big  steel  bar  there,  and 
apply  the  pull  to  the  other  end  of  it.  And  the  force  of  the 
pull  is  measured  by  the  amount  that  the  bar  stretches.  When 
the  pull  is  taken  off,  it  goes  back  to  exactly  the  length  it  was 
before." 

Jean  was  inclined  to  be  incredulous.  Did  he  mean  that  a 
great  solid  piece  of  cold  steel  like  that  would  actually  pull  out 
longer  and  then  fly  back  like  a  rubber-band  ? 

"You  could  stretch  it  yourself,"  he  said,  "enough  so  that 
one  of  our  instruments  could  measure  it." 

"They  stretch  and  they  get  tired,"  she  mused.    "It  makes 


THE    LABORATORY  291 

them  seem  more  alive,  somehow,  than  I  ever  thought  they 
were." 

"You're  getting  the  idea,"  he  told  her. 

It  was  this  idea  that  grew  steadily  more  fascinating  and 
more  marvelous  during  the  whole  of  the  next  two  hours.  She 
saw  heautiful  photomicrographs  that  betrayed  the  strange 
crystalline  structure  of  this  metal  and  that.  She  learned, 
from  watching  Schultz  at  his  polishing,  how  incredibly  sensi 
tive  they  were.  "He's  been  hours  at  that,"  Hugh  said,  "and 
he  could  have  put  a  good  commercial  burnish  on  it  in  two  min 
utes.  But  under  the  microscope  it  would  be  nothing  but  a 
smear.  And  squeezing  it  in  a  vise,  or  getting  it  hot  by  run 
ning  his  wheel  too  fast,  would  change  the  structure  of  it  com 
pletely.  He's  as  tender  with  it  as  if  it  were  a  baby,  you  see ; 
and  when  he's  through  with  it  and  we've  given  it  a  little  rest, 
and  etched  the  crystal  outlines  with  a  little  weak  acid,  then 
it  will  be  possible  to  see  what  it  really  looks  like." 

She  had  explained  to  her  the  great  horizontal  microscope 
through  which  he  studied  his  specimens  and  took  their  photo 
graphs  ;  the  very  light  he  used  for  the  purpose  had  to  be  cooled 
by  passing  through  water.  And  she  saw  the  electric  furnaces 
— strangely  harmless  and  insignificant-looking  considering  the 
fiery  energies  they  contained — and  the  mysterious  thermo 
couples  that  registered  the  exact  degree  of  heat. 

"You  can't  exaggerate  the  importance  to  us,"  Hugh  said,  "of 
being  able  to  produce  and  regulate  and  measure  temperatures. 
From  the  moment  a  metal  begins  to  freeze.  .  ." 

She  exclaimed  over  the  word. 

"Solid  metals  are  only  frozen  liquids,"  he  told  her.  "They 
freeze  at  higher  temperatures  than  we're  accustomed  to,  that's 
all.  And  it  makes  an  enormous  difference  in  the  characteris 
tics  they'll  show,  whether  they've  been  frozen  slowly  or  sud 
denly;  how  much  leisure  they've  been  given  for  adapting 
themselves  to  a  new  state  of  things.  And  they  go  on  changing 
— reorganizing  themselves — away  below  the  freezing  point; 
long  after  they're  solid  all  the  way  through;  after  they've 
stopped  being  incandescent ;  after  they're  cool  enough  to  hold 
in  your  hands. 


AN  AMERICAN   FAMILY 

"That's  why  they're  such  tyrants,"  he  added  with  a  smile. 
"I  hook  up  a  thermo-couple  to  an  electric  bell  in  my  bedroom 
over  there,  to  call  me  when  a  specimen  I'm  studying  has  got 
down  to  a  certain  temperature.  It  won't  wait  for  me.  It 
will  be  in  a  phase,  just  then,  that  it  won't  repeat.  So,  if  I 
want  to  see,  I  have  to  be  there  to  look.  It  will  never  be  just 
like  that  again." 

"Why,  they're  human,  in  that!"  she  exclaimed;  but  he 
would  not  accept  the  word. 

"They've  as  many  moods  and  varieties  and  mysteries — as  a 
poet's  conception  of  a  woman.  But  if  one's  imaginative  and 
patient  enough,  he'll  get  down  to  the  truth,  at  last.  There's 
always  a  law  there.  And  when  you've  found  it,  it  will  always 
work." 

Then,  suddenly,  "Come  in  here/3  he  said.  "There's  some 
thing  I  want  to  show  you."  He  led  her  back  into  his  library, 
where  he  had  shown  her  the  photographs. 

He  unlocked  a  safe,  that  was  built  in  under  his  bookcases, 
took  a  small  steel  strong  box  out  of  it  and  under  her  eyes, 
at  the  desk,  unlocked  this.  It  contained  ten  or  a  dozen  pieces 
of  lead-colored  metal  of  various  sizes  and  shapes.  He  picked 
out  one  of  them,  a  roughly  rounded  disc,  and  handed  it  to  her. 

"It  feels  like  lead,"  she  said,  looking  at  it  curiously.  "What 
is  it?" 

Before  he  answered,  he  took  it  from  her  and  tossed  it  on 
the  desk.  It  rebounded  with  the  clear  ring  of  silver. 

"It's  like  nothing  we've  ever  called  lead  before,"  he  said; 
"not  in  its  physical  characteristics,  that  is.  But  chemically, 
I'm  practically  certain,  there's  nothing  but  pure  metallic  lead 
in  it.  Only,  I've  managed  to  catch  a  different  phase  of  it  from 
any  that's  been  found  before.  I've  persuaded  the  molecules  to 
arrange  themselves  in  a  new  way.  And  the  crystals,  to  a 
marked  degree,  have  a  similar  polarity.  It's  immensely 
harder  than  lead,  but  it's  quite  as  plastic," 

He  made  a  thoughtful  pause  there.  Then,  with  a  smile  re 
flecting  some  emotion  she  could  only  guess  at,  he  added,  "If 
I  can  ever  really  get  it,  and  publish  a  description  of  it,  I  sup 
pose  I'll  be  entitled  to  call  it  Corbettite." 


THE    LABORATORY  293 

"If  you  can  really  get  it?"  she  questioned.  "Haven't  you 
got  it  there?" 

"I  can't  do  it  every  time,"  he  said,  his  absent  gaze  turned 
to  the  window.  "A  year  ago,  I  felt  nearer  it  than  I  do  now. 
Then  every  experiment  brought  mo  nearer  to  it — made  the 
possibility  that  had  only  seemed  barely  worth  playing  with  at 
first,  come  out  clearer.  But  then,  when  I  carried  it  further 
along,  it  began  to  take — freaks.  That's  not  the  right  way  to 
put  it,  of  course.  It  was  acting,  all  along,  according  to  its  own 
laws.  Only,  I'd  got  into  the  domain  of  some  law  that  I 
hadn't  discovered.  I'd  think  I  was  doing  the  same  thing  every 
time,  but  some  factor  I  hadn't  taken  into  account,  would  be 
different.  J  haven't  found  it  yet.  Half  the  times  I  try,  I  can 
produce  a  material  like  that.  The  other  half  I  can't." 

"That  must  be  perfectly  maddening/'  she  said. 

"You  can't  be  mad  in  this  work,"  he  told  her.  "Besent- 
mcnts  and  impatiences  may  effect  something  when  you're 
dealing  with  your  kind,  but  it  doesn't  do  to  indulge  them  with 
metals.  When  you  come  into  their  world,  you've  got  to  sub 
scribe  to  their  laws  and  ways.  It  wants  a  degree  of  patience 
to  make  a  metallurgist,  that  would  seem  contemptible  in  a 
man.  But  a  metallurgist,  who  was  nothing  else,  wouldn't 
care.  In  so  far  as  I  am  one,  those  bits  of  metal  in  that  box 
are  the  biggest  fact  in  my  life.  I  may  spend  the  rest  of  it 
hunting  for  the  secret  they're  still  holding  back  from  me. 
Another  man  may  find  it  while  I  am  still  looking ;  or  the  day 
after  I  am  dead.  Or,  I  may  find  it  myself,  to-morrow.  And, 
I  suppose,  a  pure  scientist — if  there  were  such  a  monster  in 
the  world — wouldn't  care  about  that,  either." 

She  turned  away  from  him  suddenly,  and  went  over  to  the 
window;  heard  him  locking  up  the  box  again  and  putting  it 
back  into  the  safe,  without  turning  round.  Then, 

"What  will  Corbettite  do,"  she  asked,  "when  you  have  really 
found  it?" 

"That's  what  I  try  to  pretend  I  am  not  interested  in,"  he 
said.  " — More  honestly,  what  I  try  not  to  be  interested  in." 

At  that  she  pressed  her  hands  to  her  eyes,  turned  and  stared 
at  him.  "Why?" 


294  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

"Well,  if  you're  looking  for  something  you  want  very 
much,"  he  explained,  "you're  likely  to  think  you  see  it  when 
you  don't.  Here's  a  parable  for  you : 

"Do  you  remember  that  room  out  there,  that  you  said  was 
like  a  refrigerator  ? — The  room  I  told  you  had  a  separate  foun 
dation,  independent  of  all  the  rest  of  the  building  so  that  the 
vibrations  wouldn't  be  communicated  to  it  ?  We  can  control 
the  temperature  in  that  room  to  a  fraction  of  a  degree.  I  have 
worked  in  there,  for  hours  at  a  stretch,  in  a  sort  of  modified 
deep-sea-diver's  suit,  helmet  and  all,  getting  my  air  through 
a  hose  from  the  outside,  and  having  my  warmth  and  moisture 
carried  away  through  another.  A  man's  body,  you  see,  is  only 
a  sort  of  glorified  donkey-engine,  radiating  heat,  breathing 
out  carbonic-acid,  and  there  are  close  experiments  that  these 
factors  have  to  be  eliminated  from.  Well,  a  perfect  scientist 
ought  to  wear  a  sort  of  spiritual  diving-suit  like  that.  He 
hasn't  any  business  with  hopes.  Don't  you  see  ?" 

But  he  did  not  wait  for  her  reply.  "Why,  that  stuff,"  he 
said,  with  a  sudden  change  of  manner,  "is  incomparably  the 
best  anti-friction  metal  in  the  world.  I've  babbitted  an  ordi 
nary  standard  bearing  with  it  and  run  it  dry — without  oil,  I 
mean — for  six  hours  at  three  thousand  revolutions,  without 
getting  it  hot.  That's  as  fast  as  an  airplane  motor  runs. 
It  had  a  glaze  on  it,  when  I  took  it  out,  that  must  be,  I  think, 
the  most  nearly  frictionless  surface  that  ever  has  been  made, 
on  anything." 

"You  mean,"  she  asked,  in  a  manner  of  strong  excitement, 
"that  if  an  airplane  pilot  ran  out  of  oil.  .  ." 

"He'd  hardly  need  start  with  any,"  said  Hugh.  "It  ought 
to  add  ten  hours,  I  should  think,  to  the  flying-life  of  a  plane." 

There  was  a  silence.  The  girl  dropped  into  a  chair  and 
clasped  her  hands  in  her  lap.  She  hoped  he  wouldn't  see  that 
they  were  trembling.  But  she  was  safe  enough.  He  had 
drifted  off  into  an  abstraction;  stood  there  in  the  window, 
his  hands  in  his  trousers  pockets,  gazing  out  at  the  thickening 
twilight. 

Finally  he  said,  "Greg  was  out  here  a  while  ago.  I  didn't 
show  him  'Corbettite,'  but  I  gave  him  a  look  at  everything 


THE    LABORATORY  295 

else.  He  was  interested  all  right.  But  just  before  he  went 
away,  he  said,  'You  ought  to  have  a  lot  of  fun  out  of  this.  It 
must  cost  you  as  much  as  a  steam-yacht/  And  I  don't  blame 
him  for  taking  it  like  that.  The  thing  is  so  near  like  the 
most  wonderful  toy  in  the  world,  that  I  sometimes  almost 
wonder,  myself,  if  it  isn't." 

"Was  that  why  you  didn't  want  to  bring  me?"  she  de 
manded  in  sudden  enlightenment.  "Because  you  thought  Fd 
take  it  like  that?" 

"I  didn't  think  you  would,"  he  said,  "but  I  wanted  you  so 
much  not  to,  that  I  had  to — stiffen  up  a  little  to  put  it  to  the 
test." 

She  made  no  attempt  to  tell  him  how  she  did  feel  about 
it.  There  was,  plainly  enough,  no  need  of  that.  They  set  out 
homeward,  presently,  and  walked  all  the  way  with  no  more 
than  a  casual  absent  comment  on  the  people  they  passed  and 
the  duat  blowing  up  the  street  and  the  gulls  over  the  river. 
And  at  last,  on  her  part,  even  that  died  away. 

"I've  simply  paralyzed  you  this  afternoon,"  he  said  at  last, 
when  they  stood  in  the  doorway  of  the  apartment  building 
that  she  called,  just  now,  home.  "I  don't  wonder.  You've 
had  metallurgy  enough  to  make  anybody's  head  swim."  And 
then,  with  a  closer  look  at  her,  "Why,  Jean !  What  is  it?" 

"If  s  nothing.  It's  just  what  you  said ;  that  I'm — paralyzed. 
Only  not  by  metallurgy.  Xot  by  the  new  world  you've 
been  showing  me.  By  the  new  things  you've  given  me  to 
think  about — and  understand — begin  to  understand,  anyway — 
about  my  old  one.  It's  the — parables  you've  been  showing 
me.  Oh,  not  the  one  about  the  diving  suit.  Because  you  don't 
wear  one.  I'm  very  glad  of  that.  Good  night." 

Hugh  walked  slowly  home,  pondering  upon  those  parables 
which  she  said  he  had  shown  her.  She  had  given  him  new 
things  to  think  about  his  old  world ;  no  doubt  of  that. 


CHAPTER  XXIII 

THAT  first  visit  of  Jean's  to  Hugh's  laboratory  had  no 
immediately  visible  and  dramatic  results.     It  was  not 
really  until  months  afterward,  that  he  found  himself  dat 
ing  events  from  it  as  from  a  new  era.    The  comparison  to  a 
water-shed  suggests  itself.     These  do  not  always  lie  along 
craggy  summits.    The  Corbetts,  going  out  from  town  to  the 
plant  at  Eiverdale,  crossed  daily,  from  the  St.  Lawrence  Valley 
into  the  Mississippi,  and  back  again  at  night.    But  not  one  of 
them  could  have  told  where  the  divide  was. 

That  question  of  Jean's  about  Corbettite — What  will  it  do  ? 
• — had  not  so  much  suggested  a  new  idea  to  Hugh  as  it  had 
fertilized,  given  a  germinant  power  to  an  idea  that  was  al 
ready  in  his  mind.  He  had  answered,  to  bo  sure,  that  a 
scientist  had  no  legitimate  concern  with  the  practical  appli 
cations  of  his  science.  But,  even  as  he  spoke,  he  doubted 
whether  this  were  the  final  answer.  That  doubt  was  pregnant 
with  a  revolutionary  change  in  him.  The  talk  with  Jean 
over  those  bits  of  strange  metal  in  his  strong-box ;  the  picture 
which  one  of  her  vivid  questions  lodged  with  terrible  con- 
creteness  in  his  mind,  of  an  aviator,  miles  up  in  the  frosty 
air,  his  motor  stalled  because  a  bearing  had  got  hot  enough 
to  bind,  became,  as  he  could  see  afterward,  one  of  his  "critical 
angles." 

But  the  development  along  the  new  plane  was  slow ;  at  first, 
almost  imperceptible.  If  this  fact  makes  you  impatient  with 
him,  if  you  ask  why  he  did  not  at  once,  realizing  the  great 
need,  adopt  the  new  motivation ;  why  he  did  not  say  there  and 
then  to  the  girl  who  was  watching  him  so  breathless  ? — "From 
now  forward,  this  laboratory  of  mine  shall  be  nothing  but  an 
instrument  to  serve  my  country's  and  civilization's  needs." — 
I  can  only  ask  you  to  remember  when  it  was  that  this  scene 
took  place. 

296 


THE    LABORATORY  297 

As  I  write,  in  January  nineteen  eighteen,  the  nation 
seethes  with  a  great  impatience.  "Why  are  we  not  ready? 
Why,  with  the  enemy's  great  offensive  imminent,  are  not  our 
armies  holding  their  sector  of  the  lines  in  France  ?  WThy  are 
our  men  in  the  training-camps  at  home,  still  without  rifles, 
guns,  machine  guns ;  even  without  shoes  to  march  in  and  over 
coats  to  keep  them  warm?  Where  are  the  ships,  the  railroad 
equipment,  the  vast  supplies?"  We've  been  nine  months  at 
war,  and  when  a  complacent  secretary  assures  us  that  we 
have  done  well,  we  stare  at  him  in  angry  incredulity  and 
demand  his  head.  This,  as  I  write,  in  January  nineteen 
eighteen. 

But  how  well  do  you  remember  the  winter  of  nineteen 
fifteen  and  sixteen  ?  Jean  and  Hugh,  walking  home  from  the 
laboratory,  might  have  talked  about  the  Peace  Ship, — tfie 
Oscar  VIII,  wasn't  it? — that  Henry  Ford  was  taking  over  to 
Stockholm.  They  were  going,  he  said  confidently,  to  have  the 
boys  out  of  the  trenches  before  Christmas. 

The  question  of  peace  or  war  was,  except  in  its  financial 
aspects,  a  platonic  one  with  us,  all  peril  of  our  being  involved 
in  it  having  been  averted  by  the  president's  diplomacy.  Ger 
many  had  been  brought,  by  easy  stages,  to  an  "assumption" 
of  responsibility  for  the  lives  of  American  citizens  lost  on  the 
Lusitania.  Another  note  or  two  would  secure  the  substitution 
of  the  word  "acknowledges"  for  "assumes"  and  a  formal  dis 
avowal  of  the  act  of  sinking  her.  Von  Papen  and  Boy-Ed  of 
the  German  Embassy,  who  were  shown  to  have  had  a  hand  in 
the  sinister  disorganization  of  our  war  industries,  strikes, 
fires,  explosions,  were  bruskly  sent  home;  so  that  was  all 
right  The  Mexican  difficulty  recrudesced  suddenly,  (it  was 
on  the  seventh  of  January  that  nineteen  Americans  were  taken 
from  a  passenger  train  by  Villa's  bandits,  and  murdered  in 
cold  blood)  but  the  State  Department,  determined  not  to  in 
volve  the  nation  in  the  fate  of  a  numerically  negligible  group 
of  commercial  adventurers,  met  it  by  warning  all  American 
citizens  in  Mexico  to  come  home  where  they  belonged,  or  to 
remain  at  their  proper  peril.  We  were  not  going  to  be  tempted 
out  of  our  blessed  state  of  peace,  into  a  war  with  anybody. 


298  AN"   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

A  different  and  more  active  leaven  was  at  work  in  the 
mass,  of  course.  It  manifested  itself,  on  the  surface,  in  some 
strange  bubbles;  the  children's  chain  of  dimes  to  build  a 
super-dreadnaught — a  feature  of  the  news  in  January  nine 
teen  sixteen — for  an  example.  The  possibilities  of  "prepared 
ness"  as  a  new  sort  of  pork  barrel  began  to  dawn  on  the 
consciousness  of  certain  congressmen.  It  was  in  this  month 
of  January  that  one  of  the  gentlemen  from  Illinois  introduced 
a  bill  for  the  construction  of  "an  armory  factory"  at  Quincy, 
"to  cost  not  more  than  five  hundred  thousand  dollars" ;  and  a 
more  urban  colleague  of  his  sounded  out  the  newspaper  offices 
as  to  what  they'd  think  of  "another  "West  Point  for  Chicago." 

In  the  main,  though,  it  was  a  consternating  thing  for  the 
politicians — this  discovery  of  a  new  and  dangerously  vital 
issue  so  few  months  before  the  great  quadrennial  conventions. 
On  the  twentieth  of  January  Colonel  Eoosevelt  published  his 
letter  to  the  Security  League  coming  out  for  universal  military 
training  and  a  real  army,  and  the  Eepublican  wheel-horses  set 
tled  ruefully  into  the  traces  to  the  task  of  finding  some  one 
to  beat  him.  Volunteers  sprang  up  by  dozens,  favorite  sons 
from  most  of  the  Eepublican  states,  like  the  harvest  of  the 
dragon's  teeth.  But  they  showed  little  more  initiative  than 
the  army  that  confronted  Cadmus.  Patriots,  of  course,  every 
one,  but  what  with  the  German  vote  here  and  the  pacifists 
there,  the  safest  thing  for  each  of  them  to  do  appeared  to  be 
absolutely  nothing.  A  yearning  arose  for  Hughes,  about  whose 
political  opinions  one  not  only  knew  nothing,  one  would,  with 
absolute  certainty,  continue  to  know  nothing  so  long  as  he 
continued  to  sit  on  the  bench. 

On  the  Democratic  side  the  doubt  was  just  as  painful.  How 
much  vitality  had  Mr.  Bryan  ?  How  many  people  believed  in 
his  comforting  assurance  about  the  million  men  who,  if  need 
arose,  would  "spring  to  arms"  between  sunrise  and  sunset? 
How  many  people  wondered  what  arms  they  would  find  to 
epring  to  ?  The  secretary  of  war,  Garrison,  was  working  hard 
with  Congress  for  his  "Continental  Army"  of  half  a  million 
men.  The  president,  announcing  that  he  favored  "adequate 
defense"  set  out  on  a  speaking  tour.  In  St.  Louis,  where  the 


THE   LABORATORY 

German  vote  is  very  heavy,  he  was  reported  as  Having  declared 
that  the  United  States  must  have  "incomparably  the  greatest 
navy  in  the  world," — the  implication  being  that  England, 
rather  than  Germany,  was  our  most  probable  enemy — but  this 
phrase  was  hastily  retracted  and  "incomparably  the  most 
adequate"  substituted  for  it.  Within  a  few  days  of  his  return 
to  Washington,  the  administration  formally  repudiated  the 
Continental  Army  scheme,  and  the  next  day,  February  elev 
enth,  Garrison  resigned.  It  was  in  that  same  week,  however, 
that  The  Chicago  Tribune  announced  in  head-lines  "PRE 
PARE  WAVE  SWEEPS  HOUSE;"  two  Navy  Bills  having 
been  passed  without  opposition;  one  for  the  increase  of  the 
number  of  cadets  at  Annapolis  and  one  for  the  enlargement 
of  the  Mare  Island  Navy  Yard.  Over  in  the  Senate,  Penrose 
announced  the  threat  that  if  the  government  persisted  in  its 
project  for  manufacturing  its  own  armor  for  battle-ships,  the 
mills  would  raise  the  price  of  it  to  two  hundred  dollars  a  ton. 

We  had,  of  course,  other  things  to  think  of  that  winter  than 
war  and  politics.  Business  went  on  booming,  a  fact  we  cele 
brated  on  New  Year's  Eve  out  here  in  Chicago,  with  an  un 
paralleled  consumption  of  alcohol ;  six  hundred  thousand  dol 
lars,  so  The  Tribune  announced  next  morning,  having  been 
spent  in  the  down-town  restaurants,  and  the  lid,  supposed  to 
come  down  at  one  A.  M.,  forgotten. 

The  anarchistic  attempt  to  poison  the  new  Catholic  arch 
bishop  and  about  half  the  notables  of  Chicago  with  arsenic  in 
the  soup,  at  a  banquet  in  the  University  Club — an  attempt 
frustrated  by  the  unexpectedly  large  attendance  and  the  con 
sequently  necessary  dilution  of  the  soup,  tickled,  somehow, 
our  sense  of  humor,  and  had  the  effect,  I  think,  of  leading 
us  to  treat  somewhat  more  skeptically  than  otherwise  we 
should  have  done,  other  terroristic  manifestations  which  were 
extraordinarily  prevalent  that  winter.  There  was  anyway — 
still  is,  for  that  matter — to  our  Middle  Western  American 
minds,  something  fantastically  humorous  about  the  importing 
from  the  realms  of  romance  into  sober  reality,  of  such  con 
cepts  as  plots,  conspiracies,  spies  and  foreign  agents.  The 
somewhat  hysterical  nature  of  the  attempt  we  have  been 


300  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

making  of  late  to  deal  with  such  matters  soberly,  is  an  indi 
cation  that  we  don't  at  bottom  really  believe  in  them. 

There  was  the  familiar  series  of  appeals,  that  winter,  for 
various  sorts  of  war  relief;  the  most  compelling  of  these, 
Paderewski's  plea  for  Poland.  He  gave  the  thousands  that 
heard  him  play  Chopin  and  talk  about  his  stricken  country 
an  evening  they  will  never  forget.  Jean's  mcomtesse  came  in 
khaki  to  get  help  for  the  Belgians,  and  two  English  girls 
with  a  moving  appeal  for  the  adoption  of  French  war  orphans 
at  ten  cents  a  day,  thirty-six  dollars  and  fifty  cents  a  year. 
A  shop — waited  upon  by  debutantes — was  opened  in  the  loop, 
with  a  reception,  for  the  benefit  of  the  French  wounded.  The 
opera  gave  a  gala  benefit  for  the  Italian  Red  Cross,  and  the 
cripples  of  Parma.  Take  it  by  and  large  there  was  enough 
activity  of  this  sort  to  make  hard  sledding  for  the  United 
Charities,  who  thanked  God  for  a  comparatively  mild  winter. 

The  theaters  regaled  us  with  "glad"  plays  and  funny  farces ; 
we  found  The  Follies  better  than  ever,  and  we  were  greatly  ex 
cited  about  the  Russian  Ballet  even  after  the  question  whether 
we  were,  or  not,  to  see  Najinski  was  answered  in  the  negative. 

We — in  a  much  more  inclusive  sense — were  presently  ab 
sorbed,  given  an  immense  emotional  outlet,  when,  in  the 
middle  of  February,  they  found  a  young  high-school  girl 
up  on  the  North  shore,  dead  in  the  snow  out  in  a  lonely  patch 
of  wood;  dead  of  cyanide  poisoning;  and  when  a  young  uni 
versity  student  was,  within  a  day  or  two,  arrested  and  charged 
with  having  murdered  her.  There  was  nothing  parochial 
about  this  affair.  The  whole  country  rang  with  it  for  months. 

The  great  German  offensive  at  Verdun  began  on  the  twenty- 
fourth  of  Februaiy. 

It  was  Carter  who  brought  home  the  war  to  the  Corbetts.  He 
went  to  New  York  in  January,  to  be  best  man  at  a  classmate's 
wedding;  made  a  trip  to  Washington  the  day  after  the  cere 
mony,  came  home  with  his  passports  to  France,  and  informed 
his  family  that  he  was  going  to  enlist — in  the  air  service,  if 
they  would  take  him. 

This  was  a  bomb  for  the  family.  Carter  was  their  baby, 
you  see,  and  it  had  never  been  their  habit  to  take  him  seri- 


THE   LABORATORY  301 


ously.  They  had  always  petted  him.  He  had  "gone  to 
of  course,  according  to  the  family  tradition,  at  the  end  of  the 
traditional  year  abroad  that  followed  his  graduation  in  nine 
teen  twelve;  but  even  Gregory,  though  he  grumbled  over  the 
kid's  outrageous  hours  and  the  negligible  value  of  his  labors 
out  at  the  office,  did  so  merely  as  a  matter  of  form  and  not 
in  the  expectation  that  his  remonstrances  would  effect  any 
improvement.  To  Greg,  as  to  the  rest  of  them,  Carter's 
pyrotechnic  social  success  and  his  insouciant  way  of  dealing 
with  it,  was  a  matter  of  undisguised  amusement  and  hidden 
pride.  The  elder  Corbetts,  barring  Bob  (whose  derelictions 
they  had  taken  somewhat  too  seriously,  perhaps)  had  run 
rather  solid  and  stiff  for  ornamental  purposes,  and  a  bit  of 
pure  decoration,  like  Carter,  finished  them  off  rather  well; 
showed  what  they  could  do,  in  that  line  as  well  as  in  others, 
when  they  tried. 

It  was  taken  as  an  amusing  piece  of  retributive  Justice  that 
to  Carter,  after  whom  three  seasons  of  debutantes  had  sighed 
.  .  .  —  No,  I'll  admit  they  don't  sigh  these  days.  .  .  . 
had  toiled  in  vain,  should  have  befallen,  at  last,  the  magnet's 
experience  of  falling  in  love  with  a  silver  churn. 

The  family's  amusement  would  have  been  less  genuine  but 
for  their  unanimous  affection  for  Jean,  But  they  were  fond 
of  her,  and  they  remembered  Carter's  lordly  ways  with  her, 
back  in  the  summer  of  Anne's  wedding  ;  and  they  agreed  that 
it  was  a  good  thing  for  him  to  get  a  little  of  his  own  back. 
The  progress  of  the  affair  had  been  visible  enough  to  all 
intimately  placed  observers,  though  nobody  was  in  possession 
of  any  authoritative  confidences.  It  needed  only  half  an  eye 
to  see  that  he  had  asked  and  been  rejected,  that  Sunday 
morning  when  they  went  out  for  a  drive  in  his  car.  It  was 
really  rather  touching  —  even  while  one  smiled  —  to  note  the 
way  they  treated  each  other  afterward;  the  "cousinly"  good 
will  and  affection  (they  weren't  cousins,  of  course,  in  any  de 
gree)  which  they  so  scrupulously  and  delicately  stressed.  She'd 
come  round  in  time  —  though  the  boy  couldn't  be  expected  to 
see  that.  He  had  no  rival  in  the  field.  Unless  one  wanted  to 
apply  that  term  to  poor  old  Hugh. 


302  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY! 

So  the  boy's  studiously  casual  announcement  that  he  was 
sailing  within  a  fortnight  to  enlist  in  the  French  army  was  a 
thunderbolt.  He  deprecated  their  astonishment.  It  was  a 
notion  he  had  had  in  mind  for  ever  so  long,  but  his  visit  to 
New  York  had  clinched  the  thing.  "They  know  there's  a  war 
going  on  better,  down  there,  than  we  do,  somehow.  People 
talk  about  it  more.  It  seems  closer.  'Burge'  Smith  is  over 
there  already  and  Carrol  Wayne  says  he's  going.  Before  long 
I'd  have  to  begin  explaining  why  I  didn't  go.  It's  a  great 
chance,  of  course,  to  learn  something  about  airplanes;  might 
come  in  handy  if  we  ever  get  into  anything." 

It  was  not  Carter's  habitual  way  to  explain  the  things  he 
did.  But  this  explanation,  or  minor  variants  of  it,  he  was  a 
little  unnaturally  ready  with.  It  couldn't  be  said  that  he 
recited  it,  still  less  that  he  launched  it  defiantly  at  people's 
heads,  though  each  of  these  exaggerations  contained  a  grain 
of  truth.  At  all  events,  if  anybody  entertained  in  the  inner 
recesses  of  his  or  her  mind,  any  other  explanation  of  Carter's 
going  for  a  soldier,  it  was  not  going  to  be  Carter's  fault. 

Whatever  explanation  one  chose  to  assign,  there  was  a  sort 
of  splendor  about  the  boy  during  those  days,  that  put  an  end 
to  the  possibility  of  maintaining  the  old  smiling  attitude.  If 
he  was  going  because,  loving  Jean,  she  didn't  love  him  back, 
then  his  love  for  her  was  a  bigger  and  deeper  thing  than 
they'd  supposed.  He  got  a  new  heroic  stature  in  their  eyes. 

And  then,  before  they  could  readjust  themselves  to  it — 
believe  it,  fairly — he  was  gone.  There  were  a  number  of 
projects  for  giving  him  an  appropriate  farewell — dinners  and 
such — but  he  prevented  these  by  leaving  a  week  ahead  of  his 
announced  time. 

At  -a  dance  that  he  and  Jean  attended,  he  carried  her  off 
into  a  corner  and  told  her. 

"I'm  off  in  the  morning,"  he  said,  "so  this  is  good-by. 
Nobody  else  knows.  Oh,  it's  been  my  date  all  the  while.  I  told 
?em  an  extra  week  to  save  fuss.  All  the  sob  stuff.  It'll  be 
easier — for  everybody.  Don't  you  think  ?" 

"I  suppose  so,"  she  managed  to  answer.  There  followed 
a  long  silence.  She  leaned  back  against  the  pillows  in  the 


THE   LABORATORY  303 

cushioned  recess  He  had  found  for  her;  not  voluntarily;  all 
her  body  had  suddenly  relaxed — gone  limp.  She  wondered, 
fleetingly,  whether  it  would  be  in  her  power  to  shut  one  of 
her  half-open  hands — or  lift  it.  He  was  leaning  forward, 
elbows  on  knees,  hands  clasped.  He  was  as  taut  as  the  strings 
across  a  violin  bridge,  and  trembling.  They  hadn't  been  alone 
together,  like  this,  since  that  Sunday  morning  in  the  car. 
They  were  alone.  Other  couples,  coming  hopefully  to  the  door 
way,  would  see  the  white  of  her  frock  and  of  his  shirt,  and  go 
away — enviously. 

"I'm  glad  you've  told  me,  though/'  she  added,  after  a  while. 

"I  had  a  reason/'  he  said.  "Not  what  I'm  afraid  you'll 
think.  I — I  didn't  do  it  to  try  to  cash  in  on — -being  a  little 
tin  hero."  He  heard  her  gasp  of  protest  and  added,  quickly, 
"Oh,  I  know  that  isn't  what  you  think.  I  oughtn't  to 
have  been  afraid.  It  would  be  such  a  cheap,  second-rate 
thing  to  do,  and  you  don't  suspect  people  of  doing  cheap 
things.  I  suppose  what  I  really  was  afraid  of  was  that  I 
might  do  it.  It  wouldn't  be  the  first  time  that  I'd  done  a 
thing  as  cheap  as  that.35 

There  came  no  reply  from  Jean.  Her  gaze  was  fixed  on 
his  clasped  hands,  and  his  wrists.  They  were  so  slim  and  fine 
and  strong.  Carter  was  the  ''little"  Corbett ;  not  more  than 
five  feet  nine  inches  tall  and  weighing  at  this  time  around 
a  hundred  and  fifty  pounds.  A  watch,  some  one  had  called 
him  once,  in  a  family  of  eight-day  clocks.  The  yearning  in 
the  girl's  heart  was  to  mother  those  hands  of  his  in  her  own, 
until  they  stopped  trembling.  But,  of  course,  that  wouldn't 
be  fair. 

"It's  one  of  those  cheap  things/'  he  went  on  at  last,  "that 
I  want  to  talk  about.  I  brought  you  here  so  that  I  could  take 
it  back.  I  wish  I  could  really  take  it  back — unsay  it — undo 
it,  so  that  there  wouldn't  be  a  memory  of  it  in  your  mind 
at  all.  You  know  what  I  mean,  don't  you?  The  things 
I  said  about  Hugh,  that  last  time  we  were  together.  I  was 
jealous  of  him.  I've  always  been  jealous  of  him,  I  guess, 
ever  since  that  night  you  caught  the  burglar.  I  didn't  know 
I  was  in  love  with  you  then,  but,  of  course,  I  was.  That  was 


304  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 


I  tried  so  Hard  to  —  show  off  ;  why  it  was  such*  a  grind  on 
me  that  you  never  were  impressed.  It  made  me  sore  that  you 
took  to  Hugh.  I  wouldn't  have  felt  that  if  it  had  heen  Greg. 
It  always  seemed  to  me  that  everybody  ought  to  admire  him. 

"Well,  and  when  you  came  back  and  I  knew  I  was  in  love 
with  you  —  which  I  did  the  minute  I  saw  you,  there  at  the 
party  Frank  and  Constance  had  for  the  Aldriches  —  then  the 
jealousy  was  all  the  worse.  I  remember  when  I  came  up  for 
a  dance  with  you  after  you'd  been  sitting  out  all  that  while 
with  Lester  Vernon.  I  didn't  mind  being  cut  out  by  him, 
for  the  time  being.  I  was  all  set  for  that.  But  you  began 
right  away  asking  me  about  Hugh;  why  he  wasn't  at  the 
party,  and  —  how  he  looked  and  what  he  was  doing.  I  don't 
know  exactly  why  it  made  me  so  sore,  but  it  did. 

"Well,  and  after  that,  the  only  time  I  ever  saw  you  angry, 
was  once  when  I  said  something,  in  a  half  joking  way,  about 
his  being  the  family  failure.  Of  course  it  was  a  rotten  thing 
to  say.  I  knew  he  was  —  cleverer  than  Greg,  or  any  of  us; 
and  had  a  great  deal  more  advanced  ideas  and  all  that,  so 
it  was  a  kind  of  natural  spitefulness  to  try  to  say:  'What's 
all  that  got  him,  after  all  ?'  " 

"But  you  didn't  say  anything  like  that,"  Jean  reminded 
him,  "the  time  you're  talking  about.  That  day  in  the  car. 
You  said  you'd  come  to  see  what  a  —  what  a  wonder  he  was. 
You  warned  me  that  I'd  fallen  in  love  with  him.  Without 
knowing  it.  And  that  with  him  married,  especially,  you  said, 
to  Helena,  that  was  thin  ice.  There  wasn't  anything  cheap 
about  doing  that,  if  you  thought  that  was  what  I'd  done. 
It  was  brotherly  of  you  to  warn  me.  It  was  just  about  the 
kindest,  finest  —  hardest  thing  you  could  do." 

He  made  a  little  grunt  of  dissent.  "I  was  jealous,"  lie 
said,  "furious.  I  wanted  to  hurt  —  him  or  you  —  both  of  you. 
Well,  that's  what  I  want  to  take  back.  This  is  what  I  want 
to  say." 

It  took  him  a  minute  or  two,  though,  to  articulate  it. 

"You  know,  Greg,"  he  said  at  last,  "has  always  been,  ever 
since  I  can  remember,  a  kind  of  ideal  of  mine.  He  is  yet, 
I  suppose.  If  he  did  a  thing,  it  was  right.  All  along,  through 


THE   LABORATORY  305 

school  and  college,  when  things  came  up — and  they  do  come 
up  all  right,  even  when  you're  just  a  kid;  I  don't  suppose  a 
girl  can  understand  that,  really — I  used  to  try  to  think  what 
Greg  would  have  done  about  them.  How  he'd  look  and  feel 
about  them,  if  he  knew  I'd  done  them — or  hadn't  done  them. 
If  he  did  them,  they  were  right.  That  was  enough  for  me. 
Now,  I  guess  I  can  make  you  understand. 

"You're  like  Greg  to  me — in  a  different  way,  of  course. 
Anything  you  do — whatever  you  do — anything  yon  could  pos 
sibly  do,  is  right ;  is  what  I'd  want  you  to  do,  if  I  were  here 
to — talk  to  you  about  it.  That's  all  I  want  you  to  remember 
about  me." 

It  would  have  been  possible  to  smile  over  that,  of  course, 
but  Jean  couldn't.  "That's  terrifying,"  she  said  very  gravely. 
There  was  a  note  almost  of  awe  in  her  voice.  "You  mustn't 
think  of  me  like  that." 

"Must  or  mustn't  has  nothing  to  with  it,"  he  insisted.  "It's 
a  simple  fact  that  I  do.  But  it's  got  nothing  to  do  with  you. 
You're  my — well,  my  ideal,  just  because  you  happen  to  bo 
yourself.  So  all  you  have  to  do  to  live  up  to  it,  is  just  to 
go  on  being  yourself."  He  added,  in  a  deliberate  effort  to 
get  away  from  heroics,  "You  should  worry !" 

"All  the  same,  .  »  ."  she  protested;  then  let  the  sen 
tence  die  away.  "I've  thought  a  lot,  since,"  she  went  on, 
presently,  on  a  different  theme,  "about  what  you  said  that 
day.  Xot  wondering  if  I  was  in  love  with  him,  because  I 
knew  I  wasn't.  But  wondering  how  it  was  I  knew.  He's — in 
a  way — the  same  sort  of — ideal  to  me  that  Gregory  is  to  you. 
I  mean — there's  nothing  I  couldn't  tell  him,  nor  that  I 
couldn't  imagine  his  telling  me;  nothing,  on  either  side  that 
the  other  wouldn't  be  sure  to  understand.  And  there's  some 
thing  so  safe  and  secure  about  that  feeling,  that  of  course 
I  love  to  be  with  him,  and  have  him  talk  with  me.  "Well,  I 
know  now  how  it  is  that  in  spite  of  all  that,  I  know  I'm  not 
in  love  with  him.  Carter,  you  can't  be  in  love  with  any  one, 
can  you  ?" — it  was  one  of  those  downward  inflected  questions 
that  demands  a  corroborative  answer — "in  love,  you  know — • 
that  way — without  being  jealous  of  them." 


306  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

"Search  me !"  he  answered  restlessly.  "I  couldn't.  That's 
sure  enough." 

"Nobody  could/'  she  asserted.  "At  least  a  little.  Some 
way.  And  I'm  not.  I  mean  more  than  that,  really.  There's 
nothing  about  him  that  I  want,  or  wish  I  might  have  had,  for 
mine.  I'd  be  glad  if  everybody  he  knew  felt  about  him  the 
way  I  do.  I  was  glad  when  he  married  Helena — though,  of 
course,  I  was  too  young  then,  I  suppose,  for  what  I  felt  to 
count.  But  when  I  came  back,  I  was  glad,  completely  glad, 
to  find  that  his  marriage  had  been  happy.  Because  it  has 
been.  You're  all  wrong  about  that.  I  don't  think  you  under 
stand  him  very  well — any  of  you." 

"Maybe  not,"  he  said  vaguely.  Then  he  roused  himself 
and  said  it  again.  "He  gave  me  a  surprise,  the  other  day, 
anyhow;  the  first  time  he  saw  me  after  he  knew  I  was  going 
to  France.  I've  always  thought  of  him  as  a  cold  unemotional 
sort — nothing  in  his  mind  but  ideas.  Well,  I  was  wrong  about 
that." 

"What  did  he  say?" 

"Oh,  I  don't  know.  You  can't  repeat  things  like  that. 
When  I  started  telling  him  why  I  was  going,  he  said  the  rest 
of  them — of  fus'  he  said — might  have  some  explaining  to  do, 
but  that  I  hadn't.  It  was  mostly  the  way  he  looked  at  me. 
And  took  hold!  He  had  me  by  the  shoulders.  I'd  no  idea 
he  was  as  strong  as  that.  He's  stronger  than  Greg,  I  think. 
I  felt  like  a  baby." 

"I'm  glad  that  happened,"  Jean  said.  After  a  little  silence 
she  went  on.  "And  I'm  glad  you've  given  me  a  chance  to  tell 
you — about  things.  So  that  I  can  be  sure  you  understand. 
You  do— don't  you?" 

"Sure,  I  do.    You  needn't  worry  about  that." 

They  sat  there  a  little  while  longer  without  saying  anything. 
Then,  suddenly  he  sprang  to  his  feet  and  stood  before  her, 
with  something  soldierly  in  his  attitude,  new  in  him  though 
long  familiar  to  her.  She  rose,  too,  and  faced  him,  standing 
as  straight  as  he. 

"Well,  it's  good-by,  then,"  he  said,  "I'm  going  home  now. 
Packing  to  do," 


THE   LABORATOBY  307 

SHe  was  trembling  now,  and  when  she  saw  the  quiver  of 
his  compressed  lips,  her  eyes  filled  with  tears.  The  appeal 
in  his  eyes  was  as  easy  to  understand  as  it  was  impossible  to 
resist.  She  swayed  toward  him. 

But  he  held  her  off.    "Not  unless  you  want  to,"  he  said. 

She  took  him  by  the  shoulders  and  held  on  while  she  got  the 
better  of  a  sob.  "But  I  do !  It  was  only  that  it  seemed — not 
fair.  As  if  it  seemed  like  meaning  something  that — that  I  wish 
it  did— but  it  doesn't." 

He  smiled,  a  little  wryly,  but  on  the  whole  a  very  present 
able  smile.  "I  shan't  misunderstand — now,"  he  said. 

So  she  kissed  him,  and  for  a  moment,  afterward,  clung  to 
him  and  put  her  head  down  on  his  shoulder  while  she  drew 
in  a  steadying  breath  or  two. 

"I  wish  you'd  make  me  a  promise,"  he  said.  "When  I  come 
back,  whatever  may  have  happened  in  the  meantime — whom 
ever  you  may  be  married  to — will  you  let  me  have  another 
time  like  this?  And  kiss  me  again,  like  that?" 

She  nodded. 

Her  handkerchief  had  disappeared  somewhere,  so  he  let  her 
have  his  to  dry  her  eyes  with.  "You  look  all  right,"  he  then 
assured  her. 

The  music  of  a  new  dance  came  faintly  to  them  from  the 
ballroom.  "That's  a  peach  of  a  fox-trot/'  he  said.  "Shall  we 
dance  it?" 

They  did  dance  it  through.  "Tip  me  off,"  he  had  said  in 
his  old  authoritative  way,  "if  you  see  any  of  these  birds  trying 
to  cut  in  on  me,"  and  with  her  cooperation  this  tragedy  was 
avoided.  He  left  her  with  her  grandmother  at  the  end,  with 
a  nod  and  an  unceremonious  little  gesture  of  farewell.  "Till 
next  time,"  he  said. 


BOOK  IV 

THE  WHITE  ARC 

CHAPTER  XXIV 

THERE  were  two  messages  on  Helena's  telephone  pad 
when  she  came  home  about  six  o'clock  one  sharp  Feb 
ruary  evening.  One  was  from  Hugh,  to  the  effect  that 
he  would  be  home  for  dinner  at  seven.  She  shrugged  over 
that;  he  had  some  plan  evidently,  the  mood  having  taken  him, 
for  a  domestic  evening. 

The  other  message,  beneath  which  the  maid  who  had  taken 
it  had  written  and  underscored  the  word  Immediate,  was  sim 
ply  that  she  should  call  a  certain  number  and  ask  for  Mr. , 

the  maid  having  so  completely  failed  to  understand  the  name 
as  to  be  unable  to  write  down  even  an  approximation  to  it. 
But  for  one  fact,  Helena  would  have  dismissed  this  with  the 

simple  decision  that  the  mysterious  Mr. ,  who  wanted  her 

BO  urgently,  could  try  again. 

The  one  fact  that  prevented  this  summary  treatment  of  the 
matter,  was  the  name  of  the  telephone  exchange,  "Canal." 
That  took  her  back  five  years  or  more ;  back  to  days  when  the 
name  Corbett  meant  nothing  to  her;  back  to  a  different 
and  painfully  incredible  Helena — a  figure  of  half -forgotten 
romance.  She  had  called  Canal  often  enough  in  those  days.  It 
meant  a  district  down  on  the  southwest  side.  Blue  Island 
Avenue  is  the  backbone  of  it.  It  was  strange  that  a  voice 
from  there  should  have  attempted  to  speak  to  her — to-night, 
of  all  nights. 

She  rang  for  the  maid.  "What  was  the  name  of  the  man 
I  was  to  call  at  this  number?"  she  demanded.  "Why  didn't 
you  put  it  down  ?" 

"It  was  a  foreign  sounding  name,"  the  maid  said.     "I 

308 


THE   WHITE    AEG  309 

couldn't  understand  it.  I  asked  him  to  spell  it,  and  he  started 
to,  then  hung  up." 

"What  did  it  sound  like?"  Helena  persisted. 

The  maid  was  reluctant  even  to  attempt  it.  But  the  flat 
tening  of  her  mistress's  brows  and  the  darkening  of  her  eyes — 
sure  warnings  of  a  storm — led  her  at  last  to  venture  desper 
ately:  "It  was  Cal  something.  Or  Gal  .  .  .  Galley." 

"Not  Galicz !" 

It  was  no  wonder  that  the  intensity  of  the  exclamation  (it 
was  not  loud,  but  it  hissed  from  Helena's  lips  like  a  rocket) 
startled  the  maid.  But  she  assented  to  it  unequivocally. 

"Yes,  madam.    That  was  the  name." 

"That's  impossible !"  Helena  said,  as  the  maid  flinched  un 
der  her  stare.  "Impossible  nonsense !  Why  did  you  say  it  ?" 

"It  was  madam  who  said  it,"  the  girl  retorted.  "I  may  be 
mistaken,  but  I  think  the  name  was  that." 

"Very  well,"  Helena  told  her.    "You  may  go." 

It  was  all  but  downright  impossible  that  any  one  genuinely 
entitled  to  that  name  should  be  trying  to  get  in  communication 
with  her.  Her  father  had  been  dead  five  years,  and  he  had 
never,  in  all  the  period  of  her  most  intimate  association  with 
him,  had  any  communication  with  his  family  in  Poland.  It 
was  in  the  highest  degree  unlikely  that  it  was  one  of  them  who 
had  got  track  of  her  now.  Still,  she  didn't  doubt  that  her 
maid  had  identified  the  name  correctly.  Some  one  in  desperate 
need  of  her,  and  knowing  that  it  was  a  name  to  conjure  with, 
had  used  it — some  one  from  the  other  side  of  the  abyss  that 
her  marriage  had  cloven  across  her  life. 

It  was  strange  that  it  should  have  happened  to-night^-fall- 
ing  in  with  the  current  of  her  mood  like  that. 

One  of  the  numerous  "circles"  she  belonged  to  had  met  that 
afternoon  in  a  studio  on  Chestnut  Street.  It  was  an  anti- 
militarist  group,  organized  to  combat  the  propaganda  of  the 
munitions-makers  and  their  bellicose  dupes  who  were  shout 
ing  for  preparedness.  They  circulated  anti-enlistment  blanks 
and  read  each  other  papers  urging  disarmament,  the  embargo, 
the  abandonment  of  nationalistic  emblems,  the  rewriting  of 
school  histories,  non-warlike  toys  for  children,  and  so  on. 


310  AX   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

Like  all  such  gatherings  they  wer*  a  heterogeneous  lot :  a  few 
genuine  non-rcsisters,  a  considerable  number  of  pro-Germans 
and  other  Anglophobes,  a  lot  of  thoroughly  good-hearted  peo 
ple  who  thought  that  war  was  horrible  and  ought  to  be  stopped, 
and  a  sprinkling  of  genuine  dyed-in-the-wool  radicals  who 
interpreted  the  whole  world  disaster  in  terms  of  the  capitalist 
conspiracy. 

Helena  was  under  a  promise  to  read  them  a  paper  that 
afternoon.  She  had  put  off  writing  it  until  the  last  moment — 
as  she  always  did — and  had  been  dismayed  to  find,  when 
finally  she  sat  down  to  it,  that  she  couldn't  get  herself  started. 
An  impish  mood  of  derision  of  her  prospective  audience  was 
upon  her  and  would  not  be  shaken  off.  Before  a  big  audience 
in  a  hall — especially  an  audience  with  any  fight  in  it,  she  could 
have  trusted  to  the  spur  of  the  moment,  but  she  had  found 
out  from  experience  that  a  group  of  forty  or  so,  most  of 
whom  she  knew,  sitting  on  little  folding  chairs  and  expect 
ing  tea  afterward,  could  not  be  dealt  with  that  way. 

So,  as  a  last  resort,  she  had  rummaged  through  an  old 
trunk  of  hers  in  the  attic  and  found  a  paper  on  "Patriotism" 
that  she  vaguely  remembered  having  written — oh,  ages  ago; 
back  in  the  days  before  the  Riverdale  strike. 

It  was  part  of  her  perverse  mood  that,  beyond  making  sure 
that  the  thing  was  all  there,  and  that  it  was  legible,  she  did 
not  read  it  before  she  set  out  for  the  meeting.  She  had 
thought  it  was  good  when  she  wrote  it,  she  knew,  and  it  would 
be  amusing  to  see  what  came  of  it  now ;  what  sort  of  impres 
sion  a  little  real,  undiluted  radicalism  would  make  on  this  kid- 
gloved,  well-fed  studio  tea. 

Its  effect  on  them  was  about  what  she  had,  somewhat 
derisively,  expected.  They  were  nearly  all  shocked — all  but 
the  few  radicals,  who  enjoyed  the  spectacle.  But  almost  all 
of  them — all  but  a  few  evangelical  pacifists  (who  loved  the 
flag  but  wanted  it  to  float  as  a  symbol  of  peace) — swiftly 
concealed  their  dismay  with  understanding  nods  and  little 
riffles  of  self-conscious  applause.  The  chairman  expressed  the 
sense  of  the  meeting  admirably  when  she  spoke  of  it  as  a  very 
bold  paper,  startling,  no  doubt,  to  many  of  them  and  contain- 


THE   WHITE   ARC  311 

ing  some  statements  to  which  they  could  not  all  agree,  but,  in 
its  uncompromising  and  courageous  honesty,  sounding  a  note 
which  merited  their  deepest  thought. 

What  Helena  had  not  foreseen  was  the  effect  the  reading  of 
it  had  upon  herself.  It  shook  her  as  she  had  not  been  shaken 
in  years.  It  brought  back,  with  a  flaming  vividness  that 
scorched,  the  living  presence  of  the  girl  who  had  written  it — 
who  had  so  fierily  meant  it  with  all  the  red  hatred  that  was 
in  her  heart.  Hatred  of  the  State  that  had  oppressed  and 
tyrannized  over  her;  that  had  martyred  her  unforgotten 
father.  Hatred  of  all  its  manifestations;  contempt  of  all  its 
lying  symbols. 

To  Helena,  the  present  Helena,  Mrs.  Hugh  Corbett,  who 
sat  there  before  them  so  secure,  so  "prominent,"  so  smartly 
clad — whose  chauffeur  already  waited  in  the  wintry  street  be 
low  to  convey  her,  when  she  wished,  the  thousand  yards  or 
so  she  was  from  home,  or  wherever  else  her  fancy  might  direct 
— the  reading  came,  more  and  more,  to  seem  a  betrayal,  a 
profanation,  a  casting  of  pearls  to  swine.  She  longed  to 
crumple  those  faded  sheets  into  her  bosom,  where  their  heat 
could  burn;  to  stand  up  and  tell  these  piffling  fools  what  they 
really  were,  and  then  rush  away,  by  herself,  where  she  could 
breathe. 

Of  course  she  did  nothing  of  the  sort.  She  read  the  paper 
through.  She  acknowledged,  suitably,  the  chairman's  thanks. 
She  even  managed  to  talk  a  little,  though  absently,  with  some 
of  her  friends  who  came  crowding  up  afterward  to  tell  her 
how  wonderfully  "daring"  and  "thrilling"  and  "basic"  it  all 
was,  before,  declining  tea,  she  escaped  and  went  home — in 
her  car.  But  the  mood  she  was  in  was  her  blackest ;  a  smold 
ering,  absent  reverie  which  her  servants  knew  and  walked 
warily  to  avoid  waking  her  out  of.  Xo  wonder  she  shrugged, 
impatiently,  over  Hugh's  message  that  he  was  coming  home 
to  dinner. 

But  this  other  thing!  This  name,  Galicz,  coming  up  so 
mysteriously  out  of  nowhere,  on  this  very  night  when  she  was 
more  nearly  Anton  Galicz's  daughter  than  she  had  been  in 
years  before!  It  couldn't  be  made  to  seem  like  an  ordinary, 


312  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

every-day  coincidence.  It  had  the  feeling  in  it  of  a  touch  of 
the  finger  of  Fate.  For  a  matter  of  minutes  after  her  maid 
had  left  her  alone,  she  sat,  staring  at  the  telephone  on  her 
desk  as  if  it  had  been  an  unfamiliar  instrument  of  magic. 
Then,  impatiently,  she  snatched  it  up  and  repeated  into  the 
transmitter  the  number  on  the  pad.  And  on  getting  her  con 
nection,  "I  was  to  ask  for  Mr.  Galicz,"  she  said. 

There  was  a  momentary  hesitation  from  the  other  end. 
Then,  "This  is  the  Popular  Drug  Store/'  a  voice  said,  and  went 
on  to  give  her  the  address  of  it.  "In  the  matter  of  your  ac 
count  with  us,  we'd  like  you  to  see  us  about  ity  personally,  to 
night,  before  nine  o'clock." 

She  exclaimed  "What!"  in  perfectly  blank  amazement, 
whereupon  the  voice  repeated  this  utterly  preposterous  mes 
sage,  word  for  word. 

So  repeated,  however,  it  took  on  another  color  altogether; 
made  her  heart  leap  to  a  quicker  rhythm  and  tightened  her 
throat.  Again  it  took  her  back  over  a  span  of  years.  It 
was  long  since  she  had  experienced  the  necessity,  in  talking 
over  a  telephone,  of  guarding  against  hidden  listeners,  but 
she  had  done  it  many  a  time. 

She  checked  herself  on  the  verge  of  a  protest  that  she  owed 
no  account  at  any  "Popular"  drug  store,  and  asked,  instead, 
for  the  address  again.  It  was  characteristic  of  the  old  almost 
forgotten  phase  it  had  evoked  in  her,  that  she  memorized  it 
without  writing  it  down. 

But  the  next  moment,  her  every-day,  present  self  getting  the 
upper  hand,  she  cried  impatiently.  "Oh,  it's  absurd !  I  must 
know  more  about  it  than  that.  Who  is  it  that  wants  to  see 
me?  What  does  he  want  to  see  me  for?" 

"I  can  not  discuss  it,"  the  other  said.  "It  is  a  question 
simply  whether  you  will  come  or  not.  Before  nine  o'clock." 

Helena  said:  "I  don't  know  whether  I  will  come  or  not. 
I  don't  know  whether  I  can." 

Whereupon  the  man  said,  "Good-by,"  and  hung  up,  thus 
cutting  off  a  question  she  meant  to  ask;  whether  on  coming 
to  a  decision,  she  should  call  up  again? 

During  the  half-hour  that  elapsed  before  Hugh  came  in,  she 


THE    WHITE    ARC  313 

prowled  about  her  room  in  restless  agitation,,  dropping  into 
chairs  and  getting  out  of  them  again,  starting  to  change  her 
dress,  and  then  giving  over  the  idea  not  knowing  what  she 
was  going  to  dress  for.  It  was  not  that  her  mind  hung  bal 
anced  between  two  decisions.  She  was  always,  at  any  given 
moment,  decided.  But  two  contrary  decisions  alternately  had 
possession  of  her. 

To  Hugh's  wife,  to  whom  he  was  presently  coming  home 
for  dinner  with  a  notion  of  taking  her  somewhere — to  a  musi 
cal  show,  perhaps — for  the  evening,  the  idea  of  carrying  out 
that  mysterious  rendezvous  at  a  little  west-side  drug  store, 
was  absolutely  fantastic;  a  hoax  almost  too  stupid  to  be 
offered  for  his  amusement  at  dinner;  the  baldest  sort  of  pop 
ular  magazine  melodrama. 

But  the  other  Helena  who  had  written  the  paper  she  had 
read  this  afternoon,  was  fighting  for — and  occasionally  win 
ning — full  possession  of  her.  When  she  was  in  possession,  the 
supreme,  fantastic,  mad  unreality  was  not  the  cry  for  help  that 
had  come  to  her  ears  with  such  carefully  guarded  mystery 
over  the  telephone.  It  was  the  rich  husband  who  was  pres 
ently  coming  home  to  dine  with  her  and  take  her  to  the  theater 
afterward.  It  was  this  pretty  room  of  hers;  the  maid  who 
would  come  in  answer  to  her  ring  to  help  her  dress  in  an  eve 
ning  frock.  It  was  the  bare  momentary  consideration  on  her 
part — on  the  part  of  Helena  Galicz,  of  letting  that  cry  for 
help  in  her  father's  name,  go  unanswered. 

If  you  doubt  the  power  of  it  to  take  hold  like  that,  remem 
ber  what  she  was.  You  have  known  her  not  quite  four  years ; 
only  since  that  May  morning  in  nineteen  twelve  when  she 
came  into  Bailey's  office  at  the  head  of  that  little  committee 
of  core-makers.  AYlien  she  was  upon  the  point,  that  is  to  say, 
of  her  great  departure  into  Hugh's  world.  She  was  then 
twenty-four  years  old.  She  had  lived  the  whole  of  her  life, 
since  the  beginning  of  her  consecutive  memories,  in  a  world 
of  violence  and  intrigue,  in  a  guerrilla  war  upon  organized 
society.  She  knew,  at  first  hand,  police  courts  and  jails.  She 
knew  what  it  was  to  be  shadowed,  spied  upon,  kidnaped.  Her 
friends — most  of  them — up  to  the  time  when  Hugh  trans- 


314  AN  AMERICAN   FAMILY 

planted  her,  were  enlisted  in  the  same  cause  and  fared  as  she 
— or  worse.  To  the  Helena  who,  in  the  limousine,  that  night 
at  Eiverdale,  had  mangled  Hugh's  left  hand  with  her  teeth, 
there  would  have  been  nothing  romantic  or  improbable  about 
a  cryptic  telephone  message  from  a  drug  store,  from  a  friend 
"in  trouble."  It  would  all  have  been  as  natural,  as  much  a 
part  of  the  day's  work,  as  it  was  preposterous  and  fantastic 
to  Hugh  Corbett's  wife. 

The  struggle  between  these  two  utterly  irreconcilable  per 
sonalities  for  the  possession  of  her,  was  still  undecided  when 
he  knocked  at  her  door  and,  upon  her  invitation,  came  amiably 
in,  helped  himself  to  one  of  her  cigarettes,  and  stretched  out 
at  ease  in  her  long  chair.  Ordinarily  she  liked  him  to  do  this. 
Her  commonest  grievance  against  him  was  that  he  didn't  do 
it  often  enough.  To-night,  this  comfortable,  domestic  com 
placency  of  his  irritated  her. 

"You  telephoned,"  she  said.    "Anything  special  ?" 

"Not  very,"  he  told  her.  "I  thought  if  you  hadn't  anything 
else  to-night,  we'd  drop  in  on  father  and  mother.  They  are 
starting  off  for  California  early  next  week.  And  they're  miss 
ing  Carter  like  the  devil,  of  course.  So  I  thought  it  would  be 
a  good  tiling  if  we  could  try  to  cheer  them  up  a  bit." 

"You  can  go  if  you  like,"  she  said.    "I  don't  believe  I  will." 

Hugh  looked  deliberately  round  at  her.  "Special  reason?" 
he  inquired.  "Or  a  general  one  ?" 

"Oh,  I  don't  know,"  she  said.  "I'm  not  much  in  the  mood 
— to-night,  anyway — for  sitting  around  in  a  family  party, 
rhapsodizing  about  Carter — what  a  wonder  he's  suddenly  got 
to  be  now  that  he's  gone  to  war." 

He  didn't  lash  out  at  that  as  she  more  than  half  wanted 
him  to;  quietly  took  it  to  ruminate  on,  instead.  "It  does 
make  a  difference,  though — a  thing  like  that,"  he  said  at  last. 
"You've  got  to  revise  all  your  estimates  by  it.  It's  one  of  those 
touchstone  things.  We  all  get  tried  by  'em  once  or  twice  in  a 
lifetime  and  show  whether  we're  true  metal  or  not.  He  was, 
all  right.  Not  only  what  he  did  but  the  way  he  did  it.  First 
water,  absolutely.  One  of  those  blessed — straight  things  that 
there's  no  doubt  about." 


THE   WHITE   AKC  315 

At  a  sound  sho  made  then,  not  classifiable  but  clearly  indic 
ative  of  dissent,  he  looked  sharply  round  at  her.  " — Or  do 
you  mean  that  you  are  in  doubt  about  it  ?"  he  concluded. 

"Not  in  doubt,  a  bit,"  she  said.  "If a  plain  enough  to  me. 
He's  going  off  to  wear  a  pretty  uniform  and  learn  to  run  an 
aeroplane.  When  he  can  fly  pretty  well  he'll  go  out,  some 
night,  and  drop  a  lot  of  bombs  on  some  innocent  men  and 
women  working  in  a  factory,  that  happens  to  be  in  Germany, 
and  then  come  back  and  get  a  medal  for  it — instead  of  getting 
hanged  for  murder.  He  has  nothing  against  them.  They've 
done  nothing  to  him.  He's  doing  it  for  fun.  Or,  if  you  like, 
for  spite ;  because  a  girl  he'd  taken  a  fancy  to  wouldn't  marry 
him." 

Still  he  didn't  get  up  from  his  chair.  "That's  a  pose,"  he 
said.  "Ifs  like  a  little  girl  making  faces.  You  don't  mean 
it."  Then  he  looked  round  at  her  again.  "Come !"  he  urged. 
"Be  human !  You  can  be  when  you  like." 

His  invincible  good  humor  infuriated  her — naturally 
enough,  considering  what  it  meant,  how  little  she  mattered 
to  him  if  she  could  hurt  no  more  than  that. 

"You've  been  getting  human,  lately,  if  that's  your  word 
for  it  Sentimental  would  be  mine.  You're  sentimental 
about  Carter  because  your  Jean  wouldn't  marry  him.  Of 
course  you  knew  she  wouldn't.  She'd  rather  go  on  holding 
hands  with  you.  A  platonic  flirtation.  Where  there  was  no 
chance  of  her  getting — the  real  thing  offered  to  her." 

Before  she  had  got  as  far  as  that,  he  was  on  his  feet,  staring 
down  at  her,  his  look  black  with  sudden  rage.  But  she  went  on. 

"Oh,  I  know,  I  started  it.  I  thought  it  would  be  amusing 
to  see  you  two — the  pair  of  you — together.  The  sort  of  imi 
tation  affair  you'd  have.  The  only  sort  either  of  you  is  good 
for.  Well,  I've  had  enough.  I'm  sick  of  it.  I'd  like  the  real 
thing  better.  Go  and  make  love  to  her.  .  .  ."  With  a  gross- 
ness  not  to  be  reported,  she  went  on  to  make  her  meaning 
clear. 

Once  more,  as  in  that  other  crisis  in  the  relations  of  these 
two,  his  inhibitions  interfered.  Long  before  she  had  done 
speaking,  the  terrible  desire  of  every  fiber,  in  him  was  to 


31 G  AN   AMERICAN"   FAMILY 

wreak  his  rage  upon  her  bodily;  to  clench  that  bare  throat  of 
hers  in  the  grip  of  one  of  his  hands;  to  beat  her;  to  trample 
upon  her.  How  near  he  had  come  actually  to  doing  it,  became 
the  theme  of  a  sort  of  nightmare  wonder  with  him  occasionally 
thereafter.  Possibly  the  fear  of  his  own  strength  had  some 
thing  to  do  with  holding  him  back — the  thought  that  if  he 
touched  her  he  would  not  stop  until  he  had  killed  her. 

And  then,  there  was  the  stupefying  suddenness  of  the  thing. 
The  cigarette  he  had  lighted  before  he  dropped  into  her  long 
chair,  wasn't  half  burnt  yet. 

But,  more  than  either  of  these,  the  thing  that  held  him 
helpless,  speechless,  staring — as  he  had  stared  at  her  on  that 
former  occasion — as  King  Polydectes  had  stared  until  he 
turned  to  stone  at  the  Gorgon's  bloody  head — was  the  paralysis 
of  sheer  horror.  Horror  of  what  she  was,  and  meant,  and 
saw;  of  her  wanton  defilement  of  a  lovely  thing.  And,  as  on 
that  other  occasion,  it  was  not  until  her  "Oh,  don't  go  on 
standing  there !  Go !  Go  away  I"  that  he  could  leave  her. 
He  went,  then,  without  a  word. 

She  sat,  just  as  she  had  been  sitting  when  he  came  into  the 
room,  holding  one  bare  arm  in  the  other  hand.  She  stayed 
like  that,  stonily  still,  for  a  moment  after  he  had  gone  out; 
then  suddenly  and  viciously  dug  into  the  soft  flesh  of  that 
arm  until  the  nails  brought  blood.  Another  moment  and 
she  relaxed,  caressed  the  wound  with  her  mouth  and  sucked 
the  blood  away.  Her  eyes  were  smoldering  but  she  smiled, 
a  curious,  sullen,  defiant  sort  of  smile. 

I  do  not  think  she  can  fairly  be  called  perverse.  Love  and 
pain  are  messages  that  run  along  parallel  wires  and  in  many, 
if  not  most,  quite  normally  constituted  people,  strange  in- 
ductivities  are  set  up  between  them.  That  craving  in  her 
for  pain  and  struggle  was  a  fundamental  want  in  her  which 
Hugh  had  never  satisfied.  Never,  since  their  first  accidental 
encounter,  had  he  exerted  any  force  upon  her.  Again  and 
again  through  the  weeks  before  their  marriage  and  the  months 
that  followed  it,  she  had  tried — only  half  conscious,  I  suppose, 
that  that  was  what  she  was  trying  for — to  provoke  him  to  do 
something  violent  to  her,  to  use  his  strength  against  which 


THE   WHITE   ABC  317 

sHe  should  struggle  in  vain.  She  knew  he  had  it;  it  maddened 
her  that  he  would  not  use  it.  If  ever  he  had  beaten  her, 
choked  her,  taken  hold  of  her,  even,  hard  enough  to  bruise, 
her  love  for  him  would  have  become  a  whole-souled,  complete, 
satisfactory  thing.  Giving  it  up,  at  last,  as  hopeless,  her  love 
for  him,  while  it  persisted,  became  a  rankling,  unsatisfied, 
contemptuous  thing.  And  the  contempt  accumulated. 

Mrs.  Corbett  was  all  wrong,  of  course,  in  her  interpretation 
of  Helena's  motive  in  throwing  Jean,  as  she  said,  at  Hugh's 
head.  The  notion  of  trapping  Hugh  into  a  compromising 
situation  which  would  give  her  the  whip  hand  in  dictating  the 
terms  of  a  divorce  was  one  which  Helena,  to  do  her  justice, 
would  never  have  entertained  for  a  moment.  Her  real  motive, 
which  Mrs.  Corbett  would  hardly  have  understood  had  it 
been  explained  to  her,  was,  substantially  what  she  had  just 
avowed  to  Hugh.  Watching  the  pair,  reflecting  upon  the 
sort  of  use  they  made  of  the  opportunities  she  gave  them, 
gave  that  contempt  of  hers  something  to  feed  upon. 

She  had  not  plotted  out  the  consequences  farther  than  that. 
She  had  no  intention  of  springing  her  mine  on  Hugh;  cer 
tainly  not  when  he  came  in  to-night.  Their  quarrel  had  been 
as  surprising  to  her  as  to  him.  Only  surprises  didn't  effect 
her  in  the  same  way.  Her  mood,  created  by  the  paper  she 
had  read  that  afternoon  and  by  the  telephone  call  after  she 
got  home,  was  dangerously  explosive.  His  mood  had  exploded 
it.  The  materials  of  which  she  had  made  their  quarrel  were 
nothing  to  her.  She  had  begun  it  quite  at  random. 

She  was,  in  a  word,  a  much  simpler  person  than  he.  It 
was  her  temperamental  habit  to  let  herself  go,  just  as  it  was 
his  to  hold  himself  in.  And  she  was  as  incapable  of  under 
standing  his  inhibitions  as  he  was  of  understanding  her  ex- 
cesses. 

Well,  she  had  done  it  now.  And  she  guessed  it  was  just 
as  well  that  she  had.  She  was  glad  of  it.  This  was  about 
what  that  defiant  sullen  smile  of  hers  meant.  She'd  given 
him  his  last  chance.  If  he  wouldn't  resent  a  vile  insult  like 
that  to  his  precious  Jean,  he  would  never  resent  anything.  He 
had  gone  away,  she  tried  to  tell  herself — though  not,  I  think, 


318  AN"   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

with  very  genuine  conviction — like  a  whipped  dog.  It  suited 
her  mood,  anyhow,  to  think  so. 

She  had  an  extraordinarily  pleasurable  sense  of  satisfaction 
and  well  being.  She  wanted  to  do  something.  Something 
exciting.  What  was  it  she  had  meant  to  do  ? 

Her  eye  fell  on  the  telephone  pad.  She  had,  for  five  min 
utes,  forgotten  all  about  that.  She  would  go,  of  course. 

She  dressed  in  the  plainest  suit  she  had,  a  pair  of  stout 
boots  and  an  untrimmcd  beaver  hat.  She  inquired  if  her  hus 
band  had  gone  out,  and  on  being  told  that  he  had,  said  that 
she  wasn't  coming  down  to  dinner.  He  was  out  tramping  the 
streets,  she  supposed.  Thinking !  It  amused  her  to  find  that 
she  was  in  a  good  humor  with  him  again. 

With  a  smile  a  little  rueful,  a  little  impatient,  a  little  mis 
chievous,  she  scrawled,  without  sitting  down  at  her  desk,  a 
note  to  him. 

"I  didn't  mean  it,  of  course.  Not  that  Hiat  makes  any  dif 
ference,  I  suppose." 

This  she  took  into  his  bedroom  and  laid  on  his  pillow. 

Then  slipping  on  a  storm  coat,  she  went  out,  walked  over 
to  State  Street,  and  took  the  street-car,  on  the  way  to  her 
rendezvous. 


CHAPTER  XXV 

WHEN  she  got  down-town,  the  sight  of  a  lunch- 
counter  reminded  her  that  she  was  hungry.  So 
she  went  into  it,  ordered  an  oyster  stew,  sat  down 
in  one  of  the  wide-armed  chairs,  and  ate  it.  She  hadn't  been 
in  ©ne  of  those  places  in  years.  It  had  romantic  associations, 
too.  A  man  in  love  with  her  had  once  threatened  to  kill  her 
in  one  of  these  nice  clean,  white-tiled  lunch-rooms.  They  had 
come  in  about  four  o'clock  one  wet  winter  afternoon,  when  the 
place  was  pretty  well  deserted,  for  the  warmth  of  it,  and  a 
chance  to  sit  down  and  talk — as  they  had  done,  in  whispers. 

She  couldn't  have  been  more  than  nineteen  when  that  hap 
pened — the  better  part  of  ten  years  ago.  And  yet,  it  seemed 
more  real  to  her  to-night,  than  the  house  she  had  just  left; 
than  those  rich,  complacent  Corbetts,  whose  name  she  bore; 
whose  secure,  upholstered  life  she  had,  in  a  dream,  been  living. 
What  a  dream ! 

She  paid  her  punched  check — twenty  cents — at  the  cashier's 
desk.  And,  after  going  out  and  walking  a  block  or  two — it 
had  begun  to  snow — boarded  the  car  that  would  take  her  to 
her  destination.  It  was  not  crowded  but  it  had  been  recently ; 
had  the  familiar  smell. 

She  had  a  long  ride  before  her  and  she  settled  to  enjoy  it. 
Her  fellow  passengers  interested  her — stimulated  her  curi 
osity.  The  savor  of  them  excited  her;  a  man  with  a  beard,  a 
woman  with  her  head  in  a  shawl,  a  Yiddish  newspaper,  a 
conversation  in  Czech  between  a  man  and  woman  in  the  seat 
behind  her.  The  effect  upon  her  was  that  of  going  back  to 
meat  upon  one  who  has,  for  a  reluctant  while,  been  a  vege 
tarian.  After  the  car  got  out  of  the  down-town  district  and 
threaded  its  way  to  its  eventual  thoroughfare,  her  gaze  was 
constantly  out  the  window.  The  foreign  language  signs  on 

319 


320  AN   AMERICAN.   FAMILY 

the  shops  greeted  her  as  old  friends.  She  experienced  the 
thrill — not  of  an  adventurer,  but  of  one  returning,  after  long 
wanderings,  home. 

She  did  not  leave  the  car  at  the  corner  her  drug  store  wag 
on,  (it  was  on  the  far  side  of  the  street  and  the  car  stopped 
on  the  near)  but  rode  by  and  took  a  preliminary  look  at  it 
from  the  window. 

It  was  a  dingy  old  wooden  building  with  a  ridge  roof,  the 
gable  facing  the  main  thoroughfare.  Through  the  half-glazed 
doors,  she  caught  a  glimpse,  as  she  went  by,  of  a  glowing 
stove  out  in  the  middle  of  it.  The  upper  story  was  flamboy 
antly  painted  with  a  doctor's  sign,  advertising  X-ray  cures  for 
a  catholic  catalogue  of  camplaints. 

She  cast  a  sharp  glance  into  the  recessed  doorway  which 
gave  access  to  the  doctor's  quarters,  to  see  if  any  one  were  lurk 
ing  there.  She  couldn't  be  sure,  through  the  snow,  but  she 
thought  not.  At  the  next  corner,  she  got  out  and  walked  back 
briskly  and  with  no  overt  pauses  for  looking  about,  but  with 
an  eye  which  missed  no  geographic  or  human  detail  of  the 
scene,  either  upon  the  opposite  side  of  the  street  or  upon  her 
own.  She  saw  no  suspicious  appearances  anywhere. 

It  may  be  remarked  that  there  wasn't  one  flutter  of  fear 
about  her.  Whatever  else  one  may  think  of  her,  it  ia  impos 
sible  to  deny  her  courage. 

Entering  the  store,  she  found  one  old  woman  customer 
being  waited  upon  by  the  solitary  clerk.  She  was  buying  a 
precious  little  bottle  of  ear-oil,  guaranteed,  it  appeared,  as  a 
sure  cure  for  deafness. 

Helena  asked  for  the  telephone  directory,  and  on  having  it 
pointed  out  to  her,  busied  herself  with  it  until  the  old  woman 
went  out.  When  the  clerk  came  back,  she  said :  "I  am  look 
ing  for  a  man  named  Galicz." 

The  clerk  pointed  to  the  telephone  booth  and  she  went  into 
it,  to  find  that  it  had  another  door  opening  into  the  prescrip 
tion  department  behind  the  screen.  He  came  round  the  other 
way. 

"The  man  you  want,"  he  said,  "is  in  the  doctor's  place  up 
stairs.  You  can  go  through  this  door;"  he  nodded  toward  it. 


THE   WHITE   AKC  321 

but  made  no  move  to  open  it  for  her,  "and  down  the  hall  to 
the  stairs,  without  going  outside." 

She  obeyed  this  direction  implicitly  once  more.  The  hall 
and  the  stairs  were  sufficiently  lighted,  and  she  made  her  way, 
without  misadventure,  to  a  door  on  the  second  story  that  had 
the  doctor's  name  painted  on  it,  and  the  invitation  "Walk  in" ; 
which  she  did,  thereby  ringing  a  little  bell. 

Two  or  three  patients  were  miserably  waiting  in  this  re 
ception  room,  staring  blankly  at  some  terrifying  and  highly 
colored  diagrams  that  hung  on  the  walls ;  but  the  doctor,  sum 
moned  by  the  bell,  appeared  immediately  from  the  inner 
room.  He  was  a  brisk,  bearded  and  spectacled  gentleman  in 
a  frock  coat  and  skull  cap.  Evidently  he  knew  who  she  was, 
for  he  said :  "You  have  an  appointment,  haven't  you  ?"  And, 
taking  her  assent  for  granted,  he  led  her  out  the  door  she 
had  come  in  by,  and  down  the  hall,  to  a  room  at  the  end  of 
the  building;  indicated  the  door  to  her,  and  then  went  back 
as  he  had  come. 

She  opened  it,  still  without  hesitation,  and  went  in.  She 
found  herself,  rather  surprisingly,  in  a  comfortably  furnished 
room ;  carpeted,  a  solid  drop-leaf  table  in  the  middle,  with  an 
old-fashioned  hanging  lamp  above  it,  a  shelf  with  books  along 
one  wall ;  a  folding-bed,  davenport  and  a  wash-stand ;  a  base- 
burner  stove,  and,  between  it  and  the  center  table,  an  easy 
chair  with  a  man  in  it. 

He  had  been  reading  a  newspaper  and  smoking  a  pipe  before 
she  opened  the  door,  and  he  looked  deliberately  around  at 
her  before  he  got  up.  He  was  collarless  and  in  his  socks.  A 
fortuitous  growth  of  black  beard,  two  weeks  old  or  so,  covered 
his  face.  His  eyes  were  a  bright  Irish  blue.  On  the  whole  she 
liked  his  looks.  It  would  be  hard  to  say  how  old  he  was.  In 
his  early  thirties,  she  guessed. 

"You're  Heleena,  then,"  he  said. 

His  pronunciation  of  her  name  was  on  the  right  note.  Hugh 
and  his  friends  had  always  stressed  the  first  syllable.  She  liked 
his  voice,  too,  though  the  tone  of  it  had  been  by  no  means 
ingratiating ;  not  quite  hostile  perhaps.  Non-committal,  any 
how. 


322  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

She  looked  at  him  thoughtfully  for  perhaps  a  dozen  seconds 
before  she  answered.  "Yes,  I'm  Helena,"  she  said,  pronounc 
ing  the  name  as  he  Had,  "but  I  don't  know  you.  You're  no 
one  I've  ever  seen  before." 

"That's  true,"  he  assented.  "I've  never  seen  you,  either. 
But  I  knew  your  father." 

A  frown  of  undisguised  suspicion  creased  itself  sharply 
between  her  brows.  "I  knew  every  one  he  did,"  she  said 
shortly,  "from  the  time  I  was  ten  years  old  until  they  took 
him  away  from  me." 

"I  knew  him  in  prison,"  the  man  answered  her.  "My 
name's  Frank  Gilrain.  I  can  convince  you  of  the  truth  of 
that — if  you're  willing  to  be  convinced.  If  you  don't  want 
to  be,  go  now." 

They  stayed  as  they  were,  looking  steadily  at  each  other  for 
a  moment  longer.  Then,  suddenly,  rather  giddily,  one  might 
have  thought,  she  sat  down  in  a  chair.  "Tell  me  about  him," 
she  commanded. 

He  took  his  time  about  beginning;  relighted  his  pipe,  and, 
after  standing  before  her  for  a  minute  or  two,  twisted  his 
easy  chair  around  so  that  it  faced  her,  and  seated  himself. 
From  the  moment  he  began  to  talk,  she  did  not  doubt  that 
he  was  telling  the  truth. 

"You  wrote  him  some  letters  at  first,"  he  said,  "but  I  think 
he  never  answered  them." 

"No,"  she  said.  "From  the  time  they  took  him  away,  until 
they  wrote  me  that  he  was  dead,  and  that  I  could  have  the 
body,  I  heard  nothing  from  him." 

"He  died  of  pneumonia,"  Gilrain  said. 

She  nodded  assent  to  that  too.  That  was  what  her  letter 
had  said. 

"He  wasn't  so  unhappy  there."  This  was  after  a  silence; 
Helena  staring,  a  thousand  fathoms  deep  in  reverie  at  the 
glowing  stove  doors ;  the  man  watching  her  with  half  shut  eyes, 
through  the  smoke  of  his  pipe.  "He  was  a  sort  of  philosopher. 
Said  he  was  dead  already  when  he  came  there,  and  so  had 
nothing  to  worry  about.  He'd  lived  his  life,  he  said,  and  given 
it. 


THE   WHITE   ARC  323 

"He  had  one  bad  time,  but  it  didn't  last  long.  He  was  a 
trusty  almost  from  the  first.  One  could  see  with  half  an  eye 
that  there  was  no  harm  in  him.  And  when  they  found  out 
what  an  education  he  had — what  a  power  of  languages  he 
knew,  they  thought  they  saw  a  kind  of  special  use  for  him; 
interpreter.  And  that  was  all  right  with  him.  But  they  want 
ed  him  besides,  to  read  the  letters  that  came  in,  in  foreign 
languages,  to  some  of  the  prisoners,  and  the  answers  they 
wrote  back,  to  see  that  there  was  no  harm  in  'em. 

"That  put  him  beside  himself  with  rage.  He  defied  them. 
Started  raising  hell;  so  that  they  gave  him  the  solitary.  He 
starved  himself  until  they  had  to  put  him  in  the  hospital, 
and  after  that  they  eased  up  on  him.  He  had  no  trouble  after 
that.  They  gave  him  a  job  over  in  the  printing  office — 
there's  where  I  got  to  know  him — and  he  was  there  for  the  rest 
of  his  life." 

He  paused  there  with  the  deliberate  purpose,  one  might 
have  giiessed,  of  giving  her  a  chance  to  ask  him  what  he 
himself  had  been  in  prison  for.  But  nothing  could  have 
been  further  from  her  mind  than  that  question.  Indeed, 
she  had  no  questions  to  ask  at  all,  it  seemed.  She  sat  mo 
tionless,  deep  in  thought,  her  dark  eyes  glowing,  her  brows 
drawn  flat,  a  spot  of  color,  bright  enough  to  be  visible  even 
by  the  lamp-light,  in  the  olive  cheek  that  was  turned  toward 
it.  A  perilously  beautiful  thing  to  look  at,  she  was  just  then. 

Evidently  Gilrain  found  her  so,  for  he  turned  abruptly  away 
from  her. 

"We  all  liked  him,"  he  went  on  again,  "and  he  seemed  to 
like  all  of  us,  in  his  dreamy  way.  But  he  must  have  taken  a 
special  liking  to  me,  for  he  talked  to  me,  toward  the  last, 
as  he  did  to  none  of  the  others.  It  was  two  years  I  knew 
him,  before  he  ever  spoke  of  you;  before  I  knew  he  had  a 
daughter.  But  when  he  broke  loose  at  last,  he  talked  to  me  of 
little  else;  what  a  companion  and  a  help  you'd  been  to  him. 
And,  at  the  last,  he  said  to  me:  'If  ever  you're  in  trouble 
again,  Frank,  and  can  find  where  my  Helena  is,  ask  her  to 
help  you.  Tell  her  you  were  my  friend,  and  she'll  do  it.'  " 

The  only  response  he  got  to  that  note  was  a  sudden  im- 


AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

patient  shift  of  her  hody  in  the  chair.  He  had  finished 
speaking  without  looking  around  at  her.  He  was,  for  the 
moment,  profoundly  disconcerted,  and  he  concealed  the  fact 
by  continuing  to  stare,  in  meditative  silence,  through  his  pipe 
smoke,  at  the  stove  door.  At  last,  by  way  of  forcing  her  to 
speak,  he  went  on. 

"Well,  I  am  in  trouble  now.    And  I  have  found  you/' 

With  an  air  of  rousing  herself  from  a  dream,  she  said :  "I 
suppose  you  mean  you're  in  trouble  with  the  police.  What 
do  they  want  you  for  ?" 

"I  don't  know  what  the  charge  will  be,"  he  answered,  "ex 
cept  that  it  won't  be  what  they  really  want  me  for.  They'll 
frame  something  on  me  that  suits  their  purposes.  They'll 
take  damned  good  care  not  to  let  the  real  cat  out  of  the  bag. 
And  they've  got  me  here,"  he  went  on,  his  voice  thinning  to  a 
sudden  snarl  of  rage,  "like  a  rat  in  a  corner.  All  of  my  holes 
stopped ;  all  my  friends  watched ;  a  trap  ready  to  spring  on  me 
wherever  I  turn.  I  haven't  dared  stir  out  of  this  damned  room 
for  four  days.  If  the  doc,  here,  hasn't  crossed  me,  they  don't 
know  where  I  am.  But  what  good's  that,  if  I  can't  move 
hand  or  foot  ?" 

"What  is  it,"  Helena  asked  quietly,  "that  they  really  want 
you  for?" 

His  momentary  silence  after  that  question  was  asked,  the 
deliberate  way  in  which  he  rose  from  his  chair  and  came 
around  before  her,  gave  his  sudden  snatching  of  her  two 
wrists,  and  the  agonizing  grip  he  put  upon  them,  the  aston 
ishing  force  of  a  thunder-clap. 

"Now  you  answer  some  questions  first,"  he  commanded. 
"Yes,  stand  up,  if  you  like!"  for  she  was  silently  struggling 
with  him.  She  hadn't  screamed.  He'd  taken  a  chance  on 
that. 

"What  are  you,  in  the  first  place  ?  Are  you  Anton  Galicz's 
daughter  ?  Or  are  you  that  damned  millionaire's  wife  ?" 

"Let  go  my  wrists,"  she  panted. 

As  suddenly  as  he  had  seized  them,  he  did.  And,  with  a 
superb  insolence,  thrust  his  own  hands  into  his  trousers  pock 
ets. 


THE    WHITE    AKC  325 

Her  eyes  were  blazing,  green  as  a  black  leopard's.  And  his, 
also  afire,  devoured  her  face.  He  was  the  first  to  speak. 

"It  was  James  Lea  told  me  to  try  you;  said  he  couldn't 
answer  for  you  any  more,  now  you  were  married  to  a  capital 
ist  who  was  getting  fat  on  war  munitions.  We  agreed  to  try 
the  old  name  to  see  whether  you'd  answer  to  it." 

"Well,  I  did,  didn't  I?" 

He  nodded.  "That's  good  as  far  as  it  goes.  But  what  have 
you  come  for  ?  Are  you  a  rich  lady  out  for  a  lark  ?  Looking 
for  a  little  harmless  excitement  to  laugh  with  your  friends 
about  at  your  next  dinner  party  ?  That's  not  what  you'll  get 
from  me,  I  promise  you  that.  Or  have  you  come  ont  to  make 
good?" 

"You  know  little  enough  of  me/'  she  said.  "But  I  know 
less  of  you.  I  know  you've  lied  to  me.  Anton  Galicz  never 
gave  you  that  charge — to  seek  out  'his  Helena'  if  you  were 
in  trouble  and  she'd  help  you  for  her  old  father's  sake.  He 
wasn't  a  sentimentalist  while  he  lived,  and  he  didn't  change 
to  one  on  his  death-bed.  But  that  doesn't  matter  to  me. 
I'm  not  a  sentimentalist  either.  I'll  make  good,  if  the  good 
is  there  to  make.  You  tell  me,  without  lying  to  me  this 
time,  what  you've  really  done  that  they  want  you  for,  and  if 
I  like,  I'll  help  you.  If  I  don't,  I  won't.  We'll  start  from 
there." 

She  was,  as  she  confronted  him  there,  blazing,  utterly  un- 
intimidated  by  his  flash  of  violence,  the  most  beautiful,  the 
most  exciting,  altogether  the  most  desirable  woman  he  had 
ever  come  to  grips  with.  And  his  experience  with  them  had 
been  long.  Varied,  but  nearly  always  victorious.  His  fists 
clenched  inside  his  pockets,  and  his  jaw  set.  Suddenly  he 
turned  away  from  her. 

"You're  the  real  thing  anyhow.  I'll  give  yon  that,"  he 
said.  Then,  "Don't  you  know  what  it  is  we're  doing?  Haven't 
you  seen?  Don't  you  read  the  papers?  What  are  the  capi 
talists  doing — your  own  household  pet  among  the  rest?  Get 
ting  rich  out  of  the  war.  And  getting  ready  to  rivet  their 
yoke  on  our  necks  so  tight  we'll  never  get  it  off.  Making  a 
bluff  that  the  United  States  will  get  drawn  into  it,  for  an 


326  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

excuse  for  an  army.  What  do  they  want  an  army  for?  To 
collect  what  they've  loaned  the  Allies  ?  That's  part  of  it,  but 
not  half.  When  they'll  really  want  the  army  is  when  the  war's 
over.  They'll  want  it  to  turn  on  us.  To  tell  us  workers, 
when  they  get  ready  to  reduce  wages  again  and  starve  us  out, 
'Now  strike  and  be  damned !'  They  want  those  machine  guns 
they're  talking  about  for  our  streets.  It's  plain  for  the  blind 
to  see.  You  can  see  it.  You've  heard  them  talking  it. 

"Now  do  you  ask  what  we're  doing?  They  haven't  their 
army  yet.  They're  in  our  power;  that's  where  they  are. 
They're  afraid  of  us.  Thuy  can't  do  without  us.  They're 
paying  big  wages.  What  they  call  big  wages.  How  long  will 
they  go  on  doing  that  after  they've  got  us  where  they  want 
us?  Now's  our  time  to  call  a  halt.  They're  afraid,  already. 
Now's  the  time  to  put  the  terror  into  them.  To  show  them 
what  we  can  do.  It  won't  take  much.  Dynamite  a  few  more 
of  their  war  plants.  Burn  a  few  more  of  their  war  harvests. 
Show  them  who  their  master  is,  now,  before  they  get  their 
army  and  their  machine  guns." 

"That's  talk,"  she  said  sharply.  "Good  talk,  but  old.  I've 
been  talking  it  myself,  for  months.  I  read  a  paper  this  after 
noon  at  a  perfectly  polite  tea  that  had  all  that  in  it,  though 
it  was  written  long  before  the  war.  Talk  is  easy,  and  not  very 
dangerous." 

"It's  not  talking  I've  been."  The  open  derision  in  her 
voice  stung  him  to  that  response,  but  he  stopped  there  with  a 
black  scowl  of  suspicion.  She  met  it  with  a  smile. 

"What  have  you  been  doing?  And  what  are  you  planning 
to  do?  That's  what  I  want  to  know.  And  I  won't  lift  a 
hand  for  you  until  you  tell  me." 

"I  will  tell  you.  I'm  going  to  trust  you.  But  I  warn  you 
first.  If  you  think  this  is  a  parlor  game  you're  playing,  fast 
and  loose,  to  take  up  for  excitement  and  drop  when  you've 
had  enough — get  up  and  go  home  now;  while  you've  the 
chance.  I've  never  killed  a  woman  yet,  but  I'll  kill  you  if  you 
welsh." 

"Don't  talk  like  a  romantic  fool!"  she  commanded.  "Go 
ahead  and  tell  me — if  you've  anything  to  tell." 


THE   WHITE   ARC  327 

"There's  the  strike  out  at  the  Acme  place;  that's  the  first. 
They  were  making  three-inch  shells  out  there;  and  they 
haven't  turned  a  wheel  for  two  weeks.  Then  there  was  the  fire 
at  the  Peerless,  and  another  at  the  Salisbury  plant;  and 
there  was  an  explosion  out  at  the  Wadsworth  Watch  Factory, 
where  they  were  making  shrapnel  firing-heads.  That  wasn't 
in  the  papers  and  you  may  not  have  heard  of  it.  It  didn't 
come  off  just  as  we  meant  it  to,  but  it  was  enough  to  put 
the  fear  into  them. 

"That's  the  beginning.  And  it's  just  nothing  at  all  com 
pared  to  what  I  have  got  right  in  my  hands  ready  to  do,  if 
these  bloody  English  secret  service  agents  hadn't  drawn  the 
net  on  me.  It  was  all  in  my  hands,  I  tell  you,  ready  to 
spring !  Plans  all  worked  out ;  the  stuff  all  cached ;  the  men 
all  promised.  And  now  Fm  stopped;  tied  hand  and  foot/' 

"What  is  it?"  she  asked.    "—Money?" 

He  nodded  sourly.  "I've  got  it,"  he  said,  "but  I  can't  get  it. 
Oh,  that's  not  what  I've  come  to  you  for!  It  isn't  pin- 
money  I  want.  It's  thousands." 

"What  kind  of  money?" 

"Capitalist  money,"  he  grinned.  "One  of  the  big  respect 
able  brokers,  here  in  town." 

"A  German?" 

"What  does  that  matter?  You're  an  internationalist,  aren't 
you?  What  if  the  poor  boob  does  think  he's  serving  his 
damned  kaiser?  He  isn't  in  the  long  run.  Once  the  revolu 
tion  starts,  it'll  spread  all  over  the  world." 

"He's  suspected,  I  suppose,  and  afraid  to  pay  you." 

He  did  not  answer  at  once.  "That's  not  the  worst,"  he 
finally  said  glumly.  "If  he  thinks  they've  really  got  me,  if 
he  makes  up  his  mind  to  write  me  off  as  a  loss,  because  I'm, 
too  hot  to  handle — don't  you  see  what  he'll  do?  He'll  beat 
them  to  it.  He'll  inform  on  me — to  clear  his  own  skirts. 
This  fake  doctor  out  here,  who  owes  him  money,  will  gladly 
give  me  up.  That  may  happen  any  time,  I've  been  waiting 
for  it." 

He  laughed  and  showed  her  a  small  automatic  revolver  that 
had  been  in  his  pocket.  "If  that  had  been  a  man's  step  I 


328  AN  AMERICAN  FAMILf 

heard  coming  along  the  hall  with  him  just  now,  I'd  have  Had 
this  out/' 

"What  do  you  want  me  to  do?"  she  asked. 

"I  want  you  to  get  me  out  of  here — clean.  Where  that 
yellow-livered  Dutch  swine  hasn't  got  his  thumb  on  me.  Where 
I  can  talk  turkey  to  him — show  him  that  the  string  isn't 
played  out  yet.  Put  me  where  I  can  have  two  or  three  days 
free  to  turn  round,  before  they  can  get  the  shadows  on  me 
again.  That's  what  I  want.  Will  you  do  it?" 

He  was  standing  before  her  when  he  asked  that  question. 
She,  half  sitting  back  against  the  edge  of  the  table,  gripping 
it  tight  with  both  hands,  was  looking  up  at  him.  The  color 
was  high  in  her  cheeks  again,  and  her  breathing  quick — 
visibly  so — through  her  parted  lips. 

It  may  have  been  the  familiar  informality  of  the  pose,  the 
fact  that  she  had  let  him  come  so  close  without  altering  it; 
the  look,  still  defiant — not  friendly,  but  almost  smiling — • 
about  her  upturned  face;  it  was  something,  at  any  rate,  that 
he  himself  did  not  understand,  and  certainly  made  no  effort 
to  analyze,  that  took  possession  of  him.  For,  a  full  minute 
after  he  had  asked  that  question,  she  having  given  him  no 
indication  whatever  what  her  answer  would  be,  he  seized  her 
suddenly  in  his  arms  and  tried  to  pull  her  up  into  an  em 
brace. 

She  fought  liim  off  furiously  and,  breaking  away — the 
struggle  lasted  no  more  than  a  very  few  seconds — struck  him, 
with  all  the  force  of  her  open  hand,  across  the  face. 

"You  fool  1"  she  panted.  But  she  smiled.  Then,  while  he 
still  stood  staring,  as  much  amazed  at  himself  as  at  her — 
"Sit  down  there,"  she  commanded  with  a  nod  toward  the 
chair,  and  without  waiting  to  see  that  she  was  obeyed,  she 
herself  sat  down  in  another  one;  erect,  intent  on  her  own 
thoughts — businesslike  almost;  altogether  as  if  that  momen 
tary  interlude  between  them  had  never  been  played. 

"Yes,  I'll  help  you,"  she  said.  "I  can  do  all  you  ask  me 
to;  maybe  more.  I  want  a  little  time  to  think." 

Evidently  though,  she  didn't  want  long;  for  almost  imme 
diately,  she  began :  "You're  to  spend  to-morrow  making  your- 


THE   WHITE   ARC  329 

eelf  presentable.  Get  your  clothes  pressed.  Do  it  yourself  if 
you  have  to.  Polish  your  shoes;  that's  important.  Shave, 
shampoo  your  head;  get  some  proper  shirts  and  collars,  and 
a  hand-bag — some  sort  of  decent  looking  hand-bag." 

"What  are  you  going  to  do  with  me?"  he  asked  with  a 
humorous  touch  of  scorn.  "Take  me  home  with  you  V9 

"Yes,"  she  said.    "That's  exactly  what  I'm  going  to  do." 

"Hm !"  he  grunted  dubiously.    "How  about  3rour  husband?" 

She  smiled  a  curious  sort  of  smile.  "He  doesn't  matter," 
she  said.  "It's  the  servants  I'm  thinking  of."  After  a  mo 
ment's  pause,  "You're  to  be  an  old  friend  of  mine.  I'll  tell 
you  who  you  are  when  I've  made  up  my  mind  about  it. 
There's  time  enough  for  that.  You're  getting  into  Chicago 
to-morrow  afternoon,  from  the  Coast.  I'll  tell  my  husband, 
to-morrow  morning,  if  I  see  him,  that  I'm  expecting  you. 
Otherwise,  I'll  call  him  up  and  tell  him.  And  I'll  order  my 
car  to  take  me  down  to  the  Northwestern  station,  late  in  the 
afternoon,  to  meet  you." 

"I  can't  hang  around  a  railroad  station,"  he  said. 

But  she  ignored  the  interruption.  "I'll  tell  my  chauffeur," 
she  went  on,  "that  the  train's  likely  to  be  late,  and  that  he's 
to  wait.  Then  I'll  come  out  here.  I'll  come  into  the  drug 
store  at  exactly  six  o'clock — it  will  be  dark  enough  then.  You'll 
be  ready  with  your  bag  packed  and  your  overcoat  on.  I'll  buy 
something  in  the  store  and  go  out  and  stop  the  first  through- 
route  car  that  will  go  back  to  the  Northwestern  station.  I'll 
manage  to  stand  on  the  step  for  a  second,  asking  the  conductor 
a  question  or  something,  so  that  he'll  start  the  car  before  he 
shuts  the  door.  Then  you  can  come  out  and  jump  on.  If 
there's  a  shadow  on  you,  you've  a  pretty  good  chance  to  drop 
him.  He  won't  be  able  to  get  that  car,  and  there  aren't  any 
taxis  around  here." 

"He  won't  try  to  follow,"  said  Gilrain.  "He'll  see  the 
valise  and  telephone  the  men  at  the  railway  stations  to  pick 
me  up." 

"They'll  watch  the  ticket  windows  and  the  train  gates,"  said 
Helena,  "and  we  won't  go  that  way  at  all.  We'll  go  in  the 
side  door  and  through  into  the  cab-entrance,  where  mjf  car 


330  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

will  be  waiting  all  the  time.  My  chauffeur  will  drive  up  the 
minute  he  sees  me.  He'll  think  your  train  has  just  come  in, 
so  it  will  look  all  right  to  him.  There !  Do  }rou  see  anything 
the  matter  with  that  ?" 

It  was  not  a  real  question;  just  a  flourish  of  triumph  at 
the  end  of  a  good  performance.  An  invitation  for  applause. 
But  after  he  had  heen  looking  at  her  in  silent  cogitation  for 
a  while,  she  repeated,  "Do  you  see  anything  wrong  with  it?" 

"It's  all  right,  I  suppose,  if  your  husband  will  stand  for  it. 
He'll  ask  a  lot  of  damned  awkward  questions,  of  course,  but 
we  can  manage  that,  like  enough." 

"He'll  ask  no  questions,"  she  assured  him  curtly.  "Why 
shouldn't  he  stancl  for  it?  Do  you  think  I've  been  giving  an 
account  of  myself  to  him  all  these  years,  like  a  coacubine  in 
a  harem?  I've  had  guests,  before." 

He  stared  at  her  with  a  new  look.  "You.  have,  have  you !" 
he  exclaimed  coarsely,  and  made  as  if  to  laugh.  But  it  was 
almost  ludicrous  the  way  the  sudden  cold  intensity  of  her 
gaze  checked  that  laugh  before  it  had  fairly  begun.  His  haste 
to  withdraw  the  implication  in  it,  amounted  to  a  scramble. 

"It's  great,  of  course,"  he  said.  "It's  made  to  order,  com 
pletely.  Once  I  can  get  word  to  Bertsch  .  .  ." 

"Hermann  Bertsch,  the  Board  of  Trade  man?"  she  asked. 

He  nodded.  ".  .  .  I'll  make  him  sing  a  different  tune," 
he  concluded. 

She  smiled.  "I  think  I  can  manage  that.  I'll  tell  you 
to-morrow,  when  I've  thought  it  out.  We've  done  enough  for 
to-night.  Now  I'm  going  home." 

She  rose  go  quickly  on  the  words  and  began  her  preparation 
for  the  street,  that  she  was  half  into  her  ulster  before  he 
could  get  round  the  table  to  help  her,  and  then  ehe  managed, 
without  seeming  to  try,  to  evade  his  hands.  Her  arms  free, 
once  more,  she  whipped  round  and  faced  him,  her  own  hands 
warily  busy  with  her  buttons.  Again  her  upturned  face  chal 
lenged  him  insolently. 

"Anything  else  ?"  she  asked. 

"Look  here  !"  he  commanded.  "I  want  to  know — and  I  mean 
to  know — before  you  go  out  of  here — what  you're  doing  all 


THE   WHITE   ABO  331 

this  for.  What  your  game  is.  You're  got  some  game,  that's 
plain  enough.  And  by  God  .  .  ." 

But  in  the  face  of  her  smile,  he  couldn't  go  on  with  that. 
His  bluster  sank  away  into  silence. 

"Why  shouldn't  I  do  it?"  she  asked.  "I'm  as  good  a  revo 
lutionist — as  you."  And  then,  swiftly,  "You've  got  it  all 
straight  haven't  you?  Clean  and  presentable,  with  an  over 
coat  and  a  hand-bag,  and  your  shoes  polished,  to-morrow  night 
at  six.  Six  by  the  correct  time.  Good  night." 

He  dropped  back  into  his  chair  after  she  had  shut  the  door 
behind  her,  and  wiped  the  sweat  off  his  forehead  with  his 
sleeve. 

"What  a  woman !    What  a  devil  of  a  woman !" 


CHAPTER  XXVI 

WHERE  Jean  and  the  Corbetts  both  went  wrong 
about  Hugh  was  in  judging  his  scale  of  values. 
The  family's  idea  of  him  was  pretty  well  expressed 
by  his  mother  when  she  told  Constance  he  made  her  think  of 
a  ghost.  They  attributed  his  detachment  from  them,  his  way 
of  coming  back  now  and  then,  looking  on  at  their  doings  and 
listening  to  their  talk,  like  one  no  more  concerned  in  it  than  an 
unearthly  visitant  would  be,  to  his  unfortunate  marriage.  He 
had  simply  acquiesced,  they  thought,  in  the  inevitable.  He 
saw  there  was  no  good  trying  to  break  out  of  his  domestic 
world — or  hell,  as  Mrs.  Corbett  bluntly  put  it.  He  wasn't 
the  sort  to  whine  or  bid  for  sympathy,  so  he  just  shut  up  and 
took  his  medicine.  They  respected  his  reticence  and  felt  sorry 
for  him. 

Jean,  avoiding  that  error,  fell  into  one  of  her  own.  She 
saw,  plainly  enough,  even  in  her  first  visit  with  him,  that 
he  was  not  pitiable.  He  was  emphatically  not,  in  her  eyes,  a 
man  dumbly  resigned  to  an  unhappy  fate;  he  wasn't  making 
the  best  of  a  bad  job.  At  first  she  smiled  confidently  to  her 
self  but  later  fell  into  a  state  of  acute  exasperation,  at  the 
way  the  family  sighed  about  him.  She  boiled  whenever  they 
spoke  in  a  comfortably  superior  way  about  "poor  old  Hugh," 
or  contemplated  his  blighted  possibilities.  He  wasn't  a  fail 
ure  and  he  had  his  own  reasons  for  knowing  it.  Any  one  with 
eyes  ought  to  be  able  to  see  that !  If  he  had  made  a  mess 
of  his  life  wouldn't  he  be  the  first  person  in  the  world  to 
feel  it  ?  Wasn't  his  liability  to  error  in  the  opposite  direction  ? 
To  conceiving  himself  a  failure  when  really  he  was  not  ?  Of 
course  it  was  I 

She  was  right  so  far.  Where  she  went  wrong,  was  in  the 
inference  she  went  on  to  draw  from  a  perfectly  correct  ob- 

332 


THE   WHITE    ARC 

servation.  Because  she  found  him  unbeaten,  confident,  elastic 
as  of  old,  she  assumed  that  his  audacious  marriage  had,  in 
accordance  with  her  hopes,  turned  out  well. 

The  truth  was  that  his  marriage  was  neither  the  blighting 
thing  the  family  took  it  to  be,  nor  the  well-fitted  keystone 
that  Jean,  perceiving  how  tfell  the  arch  stood  up,  believed 
it.  It  was,  and  had  been  ever  since  the  partial  reconciliation 
a  few  weeks  after  the  Corbett  fire,  unimportant.  "I  believe  a 
metallurgist  is  all  I  am  really/'  he  said  to  Allison  Smith. 
"It's  enough  when  one  is  as  good  as  you  are,"  had  been  Smith's 
answer.  Not  true,  of  course,  but  true  enough  to  have  served 
as  a  working  hypothesis  for  three  years. 

Just  as  he  admitted  his  failure  as  a  humanitarian,  as  a 
prophet  of  a  new  industrial  order,  as  a  social  philosopher, 
so  he  admitted  his  failure  as  a  lover.  He  did  not  try  to 
account  for  it,  nor  even  think  of  it  as  accountable.  Where 
the  failure  of  one  of  his  alloys  to  exhibit  the  qualities  he  had 
expected  of  it  was  a  matter  of  the  most  vivid  interest,  subject 
of  endless  experiment,  the  failure  of  this  human  alloy  was  dis 
missed  with  the  reflection  that  it  was,  most  likely,  his  own 
fault. 

He  had  told  Helena  once,  in  one  of  the  very  earliest  talks 
they  had  together,  that  the  common  ground  people  needed 
for  friendship — that  was  what  he  had  been  talking  about  then 
— was  their  instincts.  What  mattered  between  them  was  the 
sort  of  things  they  did  without  thinking — in  unforeseen  or 
difficult  situations.  Well,  it  seemed  that  with  him,  love  as 
well  as  friendship  needed  that  sort  of  common  ground,  and 
it  was  precisely  here  that  she  failed  him.  Her  sudden  flares 
of  suspicion,  her  readiness  to  attribute  mean  motives,  to  im 
pute  bad  faith;  her  evasions;  the  dishonesty,  not  of  her  in 
tentions  but  of  the  very  fiber  of  her  mind,  chilled  him  beyond 
the  power  of  her  beauty  and  her  passion  to  warm.  When  she 
would  let  him  like  her  he  could  love  her — satisfactorily 
enough.  When  she  assailed  him,  taunted  him,  turned  one  of 
her  rages  loose  upon  him,  he  went  off  to  his  laboratory  and 
let  her  alone  for  a  while. 

It  was  not  an  ideal  relation,  certainly,  but,  he  fancied,  not 


334  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

uncommon.  At  all  events  it  was  nothing  to  whimper  about- 
let  alone  erect  into  a  tragedy. 

It  would  have  been  a  tragedy  of  course,  but  for  the  labora 
tory.  This  was  the  factor  which  Jean,  as  well  as  the  Cor- 
betts,  had  failed  to  evaluate.  In  this  domain  his  energy  and 
his  imagination  found  a  full  and  satisfying  expression.  His 
two  assistants,  Taylor  and  Brigham,  both  thoroughly  trained 
metallurgists  of  the  professorial  type,  regarded  him  with 
awe — with  a  sort  of  childlike  wonder.  They  were  children  to 
him.  He  saw  at  a  glance  glints  of  undiscovered  truth,  in 
the  data  they  spent  laborious  days  and  nights  collecting  for 
him,  that  were  beyond  their  comprehension  even  when  he  at 
tempted  to  explain  them.  Over  some  constitutional  diagram 
of  theirs  in  three  dimensions,  representing  a  series  of  incredi 
ble  alloys,  his  eyes  would  light  up  with  as  vast  a  surmise  as 
that  which  held  those  Spanish  adventurers  silent  upon  a  peak 
in  Darien.  Both  of  them  had  grown  through  a  period  of 
incredulous  skepticism  about  him ;  both  had  come  to  work  for 
him  under  the  impression  that  he  was  a  mere  rich  amateur 
whose  hobby  would  afford  them  a  heaven-sent  opportunity  for 
the  pursuit  of  their  own  researches.  Taylor  had  spoken  of  him 
once  as  a  crazy  alchemist.  Eventually  both  of  them  compen 
sated  for  this  phase  of  hostile  doubt,  with  an  absolutely  slavish 
devotion. 

And  it  was  no  wonder;  for  he  had  not  only  the  imagination, 
but  the  technique  of  a  genius.  His  resources  were  endless. 
Any  fact  that  he  wanted,  no  matter  how  apparently  inde 
terminable,  he  could  devise  the  means  for  tracking  down. 
And  about  these  methods,  too,  there  was  often  a  sort  of 
inspired  simplicity  that  made  them  laugh  like  schoolboys. 

That  was  his  real  world.  Until  the  day  when  Jean  came, 
for  the  first  time,  to  lunch,  and  asked  him  to  explain  America 
and  the  war  to  her,  he  never  fully  left  it.  That  was  why  his 
mother  spoke  of  him  as  a  ghost.  That  was  why  his  wife's 
rages,  her  contempt,  her  flirtations  with  other  men,  came  and 
went,  and  left  no  marks  upon  him  for  Jean's  eyes  to  see. 
Even,  the  reverberations  of  civilization's  supreme  struggle 


THE   WHITE    ARC  335 

against  a  fanatical  and  barbarous  kultur,  though  they  troubled 
him  somewhat,  came  to  his  ears  but  faintly — inside  his  fence. 

What  happened  when  Jean  came  back  to  him,  with  mem 
ories  of  that  struggle  visible  in  her  eyes,  with  her  questions 
and  her  confidence  that  he  would  be  able  to  supply  the  answers 
to  them,  Jean  a  woman,  but  with  all  her  old  unquestioning 
affection  for  him  revealing  itself  as  candidly  as  the  child's 
affection  had  done — what  happened  to  Hugh  then  can  be 
stated  in  the  simplest  and  tritest  of  phrases.  He  fell  in  love 
with  her. 

It  was  as  natural  as  that  a  Hungry  man  invited  to  a  feast 
should  eat.  "Wliat  is,  I  think,  not  much  more  surprising, 
though  perhaps  less  easily  explicable,  is  that  he  should  have 
fallen  in  love  with  her  without  being  aware  that  that  was 
what  he  was  doing. 

There  was,  to  begin  with,  nothing  about  the  process  to  sug 
gest  comparison  with  his  only  other  experience  of  the  same 
sort — his  affair  with  Helena.  That  had  been  an  agonizing 
thing,  full  of  doubts  and  struggles,  racking  enigmas,  irrecon 
cilable  desires  and  revulsions.  He  had  been  like  a  child  driven 
by  some  mysterious  but  unescapable  authority,  to  an  adven 
ture  into  the  dark — a  dark  peopled  with  hobgoblins  as  well 
as  with  enticing  mysteries.  He  had  not  dreamed  that  falling 
in  love  would  be  like  that ;  but  he  had  found  that  it  was.  His 
experience,  now,  with  Jean,  was  much  more  like  that  old 
dream  of  his  than  his  first  experience  with  reality  had  been. 
In  the  absence  of  that  first  experience,  he  would  have  been 
quicker  to  identify  the  second. 

A  stream  may  run  very  swiftly  and  yet  smoothly  down  an 
unobstructed  channel.  It  is  the  opposing  rocks  that  make  the 
turmoil  and  the  tumult.  Well,  in  the  channel  he  and 
Jean  had  slipped  into  so  easily,  there  were  no  warning  rocks — 
no  jealousies,  no  misunderstandings,  no  oppositions  of  will  or 
intent — no  questions  even.  Indeed,  the  very  essence  of  their 
relation  was  a  kind  of  fathomless  confidence  and  security. 

He  had,  to  be  sure,  dreaded  her  return  from  England — a 
surprisingly  strong  emotion,  that  had  been.  His  memory  of 


336  AN   AMEBICAS    FAMILY 

her  had  kept  itself  warm  during  the  whole  three  years  of  her 
ahsenee;  had  remained  something  singularly  perfect — some 
thing  with  a  quite  unique  charm  about  it.  And  the  prospect 
of  her  return  had,  apparently,  presented  him  with  a  dilemma. 
Either — and  more  probably — she  would  have  changed  to 
some  one  else,  nice  enough  no  doubt,  but  so  different  as  to  take 
all  the  life  out  of  that  treasured  memory  of  his ;  or  else,  being 
the  same,  she  would  offer  him  the  old  undisguised  affection. 
In  which  case,  Helena,  .  .  It  was  all  too  easy  to  foresee 
what  his  wife  would  do  in  a  situation  like  that. 

As  you  know,  the  event  had  falsified  both  of  these  forebod 
ings.  Jean  came  back  amazingly  unchanged.  The  actuality 
of  her,  simply  grafted  itself  upon  the  stem  of  the  memory,  and 
went  on  growing  as  if  it  had  never  been  severed.  And  Helena, 
amazingly,  watered  the  plant. 

It  was  characteristic  of  his  way  with  his  wife  that  he  made 
no  effort  to  understand  her  motive  in  this.  He  merely  charged 
himself  with  having  done  her  an  injustice  and  liked  her  better 
for  it.  And  then,  as  I  have  said,  let  himself  slip  into  the 
current  without  the  least  notion  how  swift  it  was,  or  whither 
it  would  carry  him. 

There  is  this  to  be  said  for  him:  individual  morality,  its 
problems  and  its  paradoxes,  had  never  been  a  field  of  specula 
tion  for  him.  He'd  always  taken  conventional  rules  and  labels 
pretty  much  for  granted.  For  a  married  man  to  let  himself 
fall  in  love  with  another  woman  was,  simply,  disreputable, 
Decent  people  didn't  do  things  like  that.  He  was  a  decent 
person.  Therefore,  he  wasn't  falling  in  love  with  Jean. 

They  had  passed  none  of  the  conventional  danger  signals. 
They  didn't  hold  hands.  He  had  never  kissed  her.  He  had 
never  even  hinted  to  her  that  his  marriage  was  anything  but 
successful  and  satisfactory.  He  had  never  been  jealous  of  any 
of  the  men — beginning  with  Carter — who  tried  to  make  love 
to  her;  never  tried  to  lessen  the  amount  of  time  she  gave  to 
the  social  life  her  grandmother  had  launched  her  in,  or  to 
war  relief  work,  in  order  to  get  more  of  her  time  to  himself. 

What  had  he  done  then?     Ridden  with  her  for  an  hour 


THE   WHITE   ARC  337 

three  or  four  mornings  a  week;  taken  her  to  the  Orchestra 
concerts  pretty  often,  when  it  happened  that  Helena  didn't 
want  to  go  and  that  Jean  herself  had  the  evening  free.  Come 
home  in  the  afternoon,  sometimes,  to  find  her  at  tea  with 
Helena  and  walked  home  with  her  afterward. 

On  the  surface  that  was  all.  Of  what  lay  beneath  that 
surface,  he  was  brought  to  realization,  literally  and  truly  for 
the  first  time,  by  that  outbreak  of  Helena's  on  the  night  when 
he  came  home  with  the  suggestion  that  they  drop  in  on  his 
father  and  mother  to  cheer  them  up  a  bit  now  Carter  had  gone 
to  war.  When  she  said  to  him,  "You're  sentimental  over  Car 
ter  because  Jean  wouldn't  marry  him.  You  Tcnew  she 
wouldn't,"  she  shocked  him  into  the  beginning  of  under 
standing.  Because,  so  far,  what  she  said  was  true.  He  had 
not  been  jealous  of  Carter,  because  he  had  known  all  the  while, 
with  a  confident  though  inexplicable  certainty,  that  he  had 
nothing  to  be  jealous  of.  He  had  time  to  get  as  far  as  that 
before  the  blind  rage  shut  down  on  him. 

It  was  hours  later  before  he  began  thinking  again. 

He  spent  those  hours  tramping  the  streets  at  random,  his 
mind  a  chaos.  But  around  eleven  o'clock  he  found  himself 
standing  before  the  great  St.  Gaudens  Lincoln,  in  Lincoln 
Park,  and  in  that  majestic  presence  he  got  himself  in  hand 
again;  not  through  any  self-conscious  moralizings  concerning 
the  deeds  or  words  of  its  great  original,  merely  through  the 
noble  beauty  of  the  thing  itself.  It  quieted  and  steadied  him, 
somehow,  just  as  a  phrase  of  Beethoven  would  have  done; 
re-established  the  scale  of  things ;  made  of  his  rage  a  mere  out 
burst  of  childish  petulance.  Now  he  could  think  again. 

And  he  must  think  because,  sometime  before  morning,  he 
must  have  come  to  a  decision  what  he  would  do.  Already 
he  perceived  that  here  was  a  situation  he  could  not  deal  with 
by  merely  retreating  from  it.  Tliere  was  no  possibility,  here, 
of  another  withdrawal,  "inside  his  fence." 

How  often  he  had  done  that !  From  his  family,  from  the 
men  he  ought  to  have  kept  for  friends,  from  his  humanitarian 
experiments  at  Riverdale,  from  his  grandfather's  trust— from 


338  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

his  wife.  Ofteneflt  of  all,  from  her.  Countless  times  from 
her.  What  was  the  matter  with  him?  Cowardice?  Or  a 
kind  of  monstrous  self-sufficiency? 

Well,  for  the  present,  that  didn't  matter.  Coward  or  not, 
this  time  he  must  see  it  through. 

He  was  in  love  with  Jean.  The  rising  and  blowing  away 
of  the  fog  of  his  rage  against  his  wife,  left  that  fact  confront 
ing  him  as  the  cliffs  of  Cornwall  confront,  now  and  again, 
a  mariner  who  lias  lost  his  reckoning.  How  had  he  managed 
to  stay  blind  to  it  so  long?  Had  he  really  been  blind  to  it? 
Why,  she  was  the  light  of  his  life !  She  was  food  and  drink 
to  him!  Manna  in  the  wilderness.  Wherever  he  turned,  he 
turned  to  her.  Whatever  he  did  was  done  with  some  sort  of 
unconscious  reference  to  her.  The  whole  fabric  of  his  life 
was  woven  with  the  gold  threads  of  her.  The  pattern  of  it 
remained  pretty  much  what  it  had  been  before,  but  the  texture 
had  changed. 

Looking  back  he  could  see  where  one  day  had  drawn  a  line 
across  it;  the  day  Jean  had  come  to  lunch.  That  Swede — • 
whatever  his  name  was — that  Helena  had  been  going  on  with 
at  the  time,  was  there.  And  talked  free  trade.  And  then 
Helena  had  carried  him  off  and  left  them  alone.  And  on 
his  asking  how  long  it  had  been  since  they  had  seen  each 
other,  she  had  answered — just  as  the  little  Jean  who  had  been 
Anne's  bridesmaid  would  have  done — that  it  was  three  years 
and  three  months.  It  was  as  if  the  sun  had  come  out ! 

What  sort  of  self-hypnosis  had  he  resorted  to  that  he  did 
not  see  then — that  very  day — what  it  was  that  had  happened 
to  him  ?  Well,  he  had  come  out  of  his  trance  at  last. 

He  was  still  confused,  bewildered.  The  problem  he  must 
wrestle  with  and  find  some  sort  of  solution  for  before  morn 
ing,  had  not  even  got  itself  stated  yet;  but  one  fact  shone 
out  above  the  welter,  like  a  beam  from  a  light-house;  he  was 
in  love  with  Jean.  Helena's  final  taunt — as  much  of  it  as 
was  aimed  at  him — troubled  him  not  at  all.  It  had  been  her 
contemptuous  notion  all  along  that  there  was  something — 
submasculine  about  his  feelings  toward  the  girl.  That  hii 
relation  with  her  was  something  less  than  real;  a  philander, 


THE    WHITE    AEG  339 

in  the  manner  of  Rousseau.  Well,  that  was  simply  one  of 
Helena's  mistakes. 

There  was  nothing  incomplete,  nothing  left  out  of  his 
love  for  Jean.  The  whole  of  him  went  into  it;  spirit,  mind 
and  body.  There  was  nothing  of  him  now,  that  was  not  crying 
out  for  her,  aching  for  her.  And  it  was  nothing  new,  this 
sensational,  bodily  want  of  her.  It  had  been  there,  all  along. 
Only — transmuted  somehow;  in  a  phase  he  hadn't  recognized. 

What  an  ignorant  fool  he'd  been!  Love  was  one  of  the 
elemental  facts  of  life — and  what  did  he  know  about  it  ?  He'd 
been  content  to  deal  with  it  in  the  fractional  currency  of 
romance;  traditional  sentiments,  their  mintage  worn  away 
with  much  handling,  and  very  likely  counterfeit  to  begin  with. 
One  of  these  precious  bits  of  coinage  he  had  been  contentedly 
jingling  was  the  adjective  "brotherly."  Had  his  sister  Con 
stance,  whom  he  loved  as  much  as,  in  the  way  of  mere  af 
fection,  it  was  possible  to  love  anybody,  ever  changed  the 
rhythm  of  his  heart  one  beat?  Had  it  ever  thrilled  him  not 
to  take  one  of  Anne's  hands  in  his ! 

There  was  time  for  all  that,  but  not  to-night.  He  was  in 
love  with  Jean.  What  was  he  going  to  do  about  it  ? 

He  brought  up  at  his  laboratory  at  last — it  was  mere  in 
stinct  in  him  to  turn  thither — and  shut  himself  up  in  the 
library,  the  room  where  he  had  brought  Jean  one  day  and 
shown  her  his  little  samples  of  Corbettite.  He  took  off  his 
wet  boots  and  set  them  to  dry ;  got  into  slippers  and  a  shabby 
old  coat,  lighted  a  pipe,  and  sat  down,  soberly  and  unhurriedly, 
because  he  had  half  a  dozen  hours  yet  before  morning,  to  think 
it  out. 

All  the  way  out  Chicago  Avenue,  he  had  trudged  to  one 
refrain :  Jean  mustn't  know.  This  was  his  starting  point — 
his  axiom. 

It  was  going  to  hurt  horribly  to  keep  her  in  ignorance. 
Well,  that  would  be  his  penalty.  Honor  prescribed  it.  When 
you  stated  the  case  in  general  terms,  that  became  clear  enough. 
Here  was  a  married  man  in  love  with  an  innocent  young  girl. 
It  would  be  a  matter  of  mere  elementary  decency  in  him  to 
guard  that  secret  from  her;  to  make — without  flinching — • 


340  AN   AMEBICAN    FAMILY 

any  sacrifice  that  the  guarding  of  it  called  for.  She  had  given 
him  her  affection  freely,  in  good  faith — confidently.  He  had 
betrayed  her  confidence;  embezzled  the  trust  fund.  Their 
friendship  was  bankrupt.  That  was  bad  enough.  But  to  try 
to  involve  her  in  the  fraud  .  .  . ! 

He  dashed  both  fists  down  savagely  on  the  desk  before  him. 
This  was  bosh — maundering.  It  was  getting  him  nowhere. 
What  was  he  going  to  do  ? 

Let  their  friendship  go  by  default  ?  End,  without  explana 
tion,  their  morning  rides — their  concerts — their  little  excur 
sions?  Leave  her  wondering,  dumbly,  what  the  matter  was? 

But  she  wouldn't  wonder  dumbly !  She'd  come  and  ask 
him  what  the  matter  was. 

Go  away  then,  without  a  word — disappear?  Leave  "her  to 
Helena's  mercies!  Helena,  with  that  flicker  in  her  veiled 
green  eyes ! 

No,  by  God,  not  that !  Not  a  chance  of  that !  She  must 
be  warned  to  keep  away  from  Helena.  And  at  once !  He 
must  see  her  to-morrow  and  warn  her  somehow — tell  her  some 
thing  that  would  serve. 

Well,  there  was  the  first  step  decided  upon.  He  would  see 
her  to-morrow — to-morrow  morning.  He  knew  where  she 
was.  He  always  knew  where  she  was ;  from  day  to  day,  from 
hour  to  hour,  almost.  She  had  gone  up  this  afternoon  to 
Lake  Forest. 

To-morrow  was  Philip's  birthday  (Constance's  oldest  boy, 
he  was)  and  he  was  having  a  party  whose  specifications  ho 
had  been  allowed  to  draw  for  himself.  The  house  in  Lake 
Forest  was  opened  up  for  the  occasion,  and  six  or  eight  small 
boy  friends  of  his,  including  his  younger  brother  Francis,  in 
vited  from  Friday  afternoon  to  Sunday  morning.  There  was 
plenty  of  snow  up  there  for  forts  and  battles,  a  gorgeous  slide 
down  the  ravine  road,  a  pond  to  skate  on,  and  larks  in  the 
big  empty  house;  trimmings  in  the  way  of  a  birthday  cake 
and  a  candy-bag  and  so  on.  Miss  Muirhead,  their  governess, 
a  strapping  middle-aged,  out-of-door  sort  of  English  woman, 
had  volunteered  to  convoy  the  party.  Philip,  who  adored 
Jean,  had  invited  her  to  come.  Not  casually ;  seriously,  after 


THE   WHITE    ARC  341 

deep  thought.  And  Jean,  appreciating  how  fine  a  compli 
ment  it  was,  had  accepted,  whole-heartedly.  She  had  gone 
up,  with  the  others,  on  the  four-twenty  train,  this  afternoon. 
Hugh  knew  all  ahout  it. 

He  hunted  out  a  time  table  and  looked  up  morning  trains. 
There  was  a  fast  one  at  eight  o'clock.  Another  point  settled. 
He'd  take  that  train  and  walk  the  mile  or  more  that  it  was 
out  to  Frank's.  He'd  find  the  party.  No  trouble  about  that ; 
they'd  be  making  noise  enough.  Sledding  down  the  ravine 
road,  they'd  be,  most  likely.  Or  trying  their  luck  with  snow- 
shoes. 

And  Jean  would  be  there  among  them,  with  snow  in  her 
tumbled  hair,  breathless  .  .  .  She  would  see  him  coming, 
and  bright  as  her  eyes  would  be,  they  would  still  brighten — 
change,  somehow,  with  welcome  at  the  sight  of  him.  That 
welcoming  glance  of  hers  had  never  failed  him;  never,  from 
the  very  first  day. 

"\Yith  another  look  she'd  see  that  something  serious  had 
brought  him  there.  That  clairvoyant  understanding  of  his 
moods  had  never  failed,  either.  He  wouldn't  have  to  say 
that  he  must  speak  to  her  alone  on  a  matter  of  importance. 
In  all  his  miser}',  he  grinned  over  the  notion  of  saying  any 
thing  like  that  to  Jean.  Xo,  she'd  rescue  him  from  Philip 
and  Francis,  who'd  be  clambering  all  over  him  like  young 
bears,  and  manage  somehow,  without  any  fuss,  to  carry  him 
off,  somewhere,  where  they  could  be  by  themselves.  And  then 
she  might  say,  ''What  is  it,  Hugh?"  Or  she  might — and  it 
would  be  more  like  her — just  contentedly  wait  for  him  to 
begin,  when  and  how  he  would. 

It  was  all  clear  enough  up  to  there.    But  then     .     .     . 

It  was  too  clear,  that  was  the  trouble.  He  could  see  her 
face — the  lovely  clear  profile  of  it.  She'd  have  dropped  down 
beside  him,  somewhere.  And  looking  at  it  all  his  excuses, 
lies,  elaborations,  melted  of  their  own  absurdity. 

It  was  no  use.  He  couldn't  do  it — to-night.  To-morrow, 
when  he  had  found  her,  when  they  were  alone  together,  then 
he'd  have  to  do  it.  Perhaps,  from  somewhere,  he'd  get — help. 
From  her  own  dear  self,  very  likely.  From  her  straight- 


342  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

looking  clear  eyes,  which  never  suspected  baseness  or  dis 
loyalty.  He  couldn't,  in  the  light  of  them,  dishonor  her  with 
the  avowal  of  an  illicit  love.  The  moment,  then,  should  serve 
its  own  need. 

He  drew  in  a  great  hreath  of  relief  and  his  body  relaxed 
in  its  chair.  For  that  night's  remaining  hours  he  simply  let 
himself  dream.  Looked  over,  like  Moses  on  Pisgah,  at  the 
green  land  he  was  not  to  enter. 

An  episode  from  earlier  in  the  evening  came  back  to  his 
mind.  Back  when  the  fog  of  his  rage  had  lain  thickest  on 
him,  he  had  encountered,  somewhere  in  Lincoln  Park,  Eodney 
Aldrich  and  his  wife.  He  had  marked  them  for  a  pair  of 
lovers  before  he  recognized  them,  and,  the  sight  being  un 
friendly  to  his  mood,  he  would  have  gone  by  without  looking 
at  them.  But  Eodney  stopped  him  with  forcible  friendliness, 
and  made  him  talk  a  minute.  At  the  time  nothing  they  said 
had  really  got  through  to  his  mind  at  all.  Now,  though,  there 
came  to  him  the  memory  of  a  certain  intense  satisfaction  in 
Rodney's  voice  when  he  said — in  answer  to  a  perfunctory 
question  of  Hugh's,  it  must  have  been — "No,  she's  back  with 
me — for  the  present,  anyhow/'  And  from  Rose,  with  a  sort 
of  satisfactory  richness  in  her  voice,  "Oh,  yes,  I  do  skate. 
But  I'm  not  this  winter." 

Looking  back,  now,  he  understood.  They  were  going  to 
have  another  baby.  They  already  had  two,  hadn't  they  ?  And 
had  been  married  just  as  long  as  he.  And  were  still  lovers. 
And  yet,  a  year  ago,  his  friends  had  been  pitying  poor  old 
Rodney  over  the  failure  of  his  marriage,  and  wondering  what 
he'd  bought  that  house  for. 

Was  there,  in  Time's  resources,  the  possibility  of  a  trans 
formation  of  life  like  that  for  him?  Not  a  possibility,  per 
haps,  but  material  for  to-night's  dream. 

There  was  snow  in  her  hair  when  he  found  her ;  snow  in  her 
woolly  green  sweater,  on  her  short  green  corduroy  skirt,  on 
her  leggings.  She  must  have  been  rolling  in  it.  She  was  all 
alone,  in  a  dead  winter  silence  as  well  as  solitude — not  a  boy 
nor  a  sound  of  one  in  the  landscape,  anywhere — when  he, 
where  the  road  rounded  a  projecting  clump  of  hemlock,  came 


THE    WHITE    ARC  343 

upon  her.  She  was  approaching  him  across  the  virgin  snow, 
but,  ludicrously,  backward  and  seriously  preoccupied  with  her 
tracks,  taking  great  care  to  put  her  toes  down  first,  and  as  the 
snow  in  the  road  had  muffled  his  footfalls,  she  remained  un 
aware  of  his  presence  there  until,  irresistibly,  he  laughed. 

Then,  "Hugh!"  she  cried.  She  had  started,  but  managed 
to  preserve  her  balance,  with  outstretched  arms,  like  a  rope- 
walker,  and  she  did  not  turn ;  remained  rooted  where  she  was. 
To  his,  "What  in  the  world  are  you  doing  ?"  she  answered  with 
a  deep-throated  little  laugh  of  her  own.  "Wait,"  she  com 
manded.  "Let  me  think/'  But  while  she  thought,  she  ex 
plained.  "I'm  a  German  spy,  and  I've  drugged  the  secret- 
service  men  and  escaped ;  from  the  dungeon — that's  the  cellar, 
where  they  are.  They'll  come  out  of  the  drug" — there  was  a 
reference  to  her  wrist  watch — "in  fifteen  minutes.  And  track 
me  down.  They've  already  done  it  once,  much  too  easily. 
They  were  disappointed  in  me.  So  I  changed  to  another  pair 
of  shoes — Constance's — to  make  different  tracks,  and  tried 
again.  This  time  I  want  to  make  it  worth  their  while." 

Then  she  laughed  again.  "Come  over  here  and  pick  me 
up  and  carry  me  somewhere.  Can  you  ?" 

"Yes,"  he  said. 

She  untied  her  sweater  belt,  dropped  it  on  the  snow  and 
trampled  upon  it.  "There  must  be  marks  of  a  struggle,"  she 
explained  as  he  came  to  her.  Then  she  held  up  her  arms 
for  him. 

He  picked  her  up  just  as  he  would  a  small  child.  "Where 
shall  I  take  you  ?"  he  asked. 

Her  answer  was  breathless — came  with  a  gasp.  "I  don't 
care.  You're  carrying  me  eff." 

Just  as  he  started  with  her,  she  shifted  her  position  in  his 
arms  a  little;  settled  herself  closer  and  relaxed,  as  a  child 
does  when  the  arms  are  familiar  and  strong.  His  heart  gave 
a  great  throb  at  that. 

All  the  way  across  the  field,  he  carrying  her  with  great 
swift  strides,  neither  of  them  spoke  another  word. 

At  the  wooded  edge  of  the  field,  the  declivity  into  the  ravine 
was  steep,  but  not  quite  precipitous. 


344  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

"I  think  I  can  get  down  here  with  you  all  right/'  he  said 
very  evenly.  "But  if  you'd  rather  not  chance  it  .  .  ." 

"I'm  not  afraid,"  she  said. 

And  gathering  her  a  little  tighter  in  his  arms,  he  plunged 
down  the  descent  with  her.  As  an  athletic  feat  it  taxed  even 
his  great  strength.  But  at  that  it  was  not  as  hard  as  he 
wanted  it  to  be.  The  exultant  rhythm  that  was  beating  in  his 
veins  challenged  the  impossible. 

Coming  out  on  one  of  the  lower  reaches  of  the  ravine 
road,  he  did  not  pause,  but  strode  on  with  her,  out  upon  the 
snow-buried  beach;  floundering,  now,  knee  deep  and,  beyond 
concealment,  breathless. 

But  he  did  not  stop  until  he  reached  the  lea  of  a  little 
breakwater.  It  was  here,  years  ago,  on  a  sun-drenched  summer 
morning,  that  they  two  had  built  a  castle  in  the  sand,  while 
the  nightmare  that  he  had  brought  down  there  with  him,  re 
ceded — almost  blew  away. 

He  stopped,  but  he  did  not  put  her  down ;  nor  did  she  make 
the  expected  movement  to  release  herself;  lay  as  she  was, 
quite  still.  Looking  down  into  her  face,  he  saw  that  her  eyes 
were  shut,  and  there  were  two  tears  welling  up  from  under 
the  closed  lids.  And  at  that,  the  whole  of  his  heart  came  out 
in  a  muffled  outcry  upon  her  name. 

"Jean!" 

Her  eyes  sprang  open,  wide  with  wonder,  and  searched  his 
face.  There  was  awe  in  them,  but  not  fear.  Then, 

"Put  me  down — now,"  she  said. 

She  steadied  herself  a  moment — clearly  this  was  a  physical 
necessity — after  he  had  set  her  upon  her  feet.  But  she  was 
not  faint.  The  color  had  come  flaming  into  her  face. 

"I  meant  it,"  she  said  laboriously,  "just  as  part  of  the 
game,  when  I  called  you.  But  it  wasn't  quite  honest,  be 
cause  I  had  time  to  think  before  you  took  me  up,  that  it 
would  have  done  just  as  well  if  I  had  walked  behind  follow 
ing  in  your  tracks.  Only,  I  wanted  you  to  carry  me."  Then, 
getting  control  of  a  sob,  "But  I  didn't  know  it  would  be  like 
this." 

"No,"  he  said.    "I  didn't  know  either." 


THE   WHITE   ARC  345 

An  ivory  colored  timber  of  the  breakwater  projected  through 
the  snow.  She  sat  down  on  it  and  buried  her  face  in  her 
3  tands.  "I'm  not  crying — really/'  she  said  at  his  exclamation 
of  remorse.  "It's  just — excitement,  I  guess."  Then,  "We 
can — talk  about  it  a  little — can't  we?" 

"That's  what  I  came  out  to  do." 

He  dropped  down  beside  her  on  the  beam.  "I  found  it  out 
last  night.  In  a  quarrel  I  had  with  Helena.  Over  something 
detestable  she  said  about  you.  I  wanted  to  kill  her  for  it. 
And  then  I  knew.  I  don't  know  why  I  haven't  known  all 
along.  I  have,  in  a  way,  of  course." 

She  looked  round  at  him  with  a  quaintly  rueful  smile.  "I 
have,  too,"  she  said.  "Of  course  I  have,  or  I  wouldn't  have 
spent  so  much  time  arguing  to  myself  that  I  wasn't."  She 
drew  in  a  long  tremulous  breath.  "Well,  I'm  glad  we  know 
now,"  she  added.  "Both  of  us.  It  would  be  worse  if  one  of  us 
knew  and  the  other  didn't." 

"I  meant  to  keep  you  from  finding  out,"  he  said.  "I  spent 
hours  last  night  thinking  up  cock-and-bull  stories  that  would 
warn  you  to  keep  away  from  Helena  and  explain  my  going 
awa}r.  .  ." 

There  came  from  her  a  little  indrawn  gasp  of  pain  at  that. 

"Oh,  my  dear !"  he  said. 

"It's  all  right,"  she  reassured  him.  "I  didn't  mean  to  flinch 
like  that."  Then  she  managed  another  smile.  "In  a  way," 
she  explained,  "it's  a  good  thing  it's  us  it  has  happened  to. 
We'll  both— Btand  it." 

After  a  silence,  she  asked  a  question.  "Had  Helena  seen? 
Was  that  why  she  was  angry  ?  I  suppose  I  must  have  blinded 
myself  to  that  too.  I  thought  all  along  she  liked  us  to  be 
together." 

"She  did,"  said  Hugh.  "For  her  own  reasons.  It  was  an 
expression  of  contempt  really.  She  threw  us  together,  so  she 
explained  last  night,  with  the  idea  that  we  weren't  capable  of 
feeling  anything  beyond  what  she  could  afford  to  be  amused 
about," 

"That  was  one  of  Helena's  mistakes,  wasn't  it?"  the  girl 
eaid  dryly. 


346  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

There  was  another  pretty  long  silence  after  that.  It  was 
Jean  who  broke  it. 

"I'll  do  anything  you  want  me  to,"  she  said.  "Nothing  I 
could  give  would  he  giving.  I'm  given  already,  you  see.  All 
of  me.  All  there  is.  If  it's  right  for  one  of  us  to  go  away, 
why,  that  one  will  go.  And  if  it's  right  for  us  to  be  together, 
why,  we'll  be  together.  The  rnain  thing  is  for  us  to  do  what 
we  mean  to  do.  Not  cheat  ourselves  because  we  want  to  so 
much,  in  little  picking,  stealing  ways.  I  suppose  while  we're 
deciding  what  we  really  mean  to  do,  we'll  have  to  be  apart." 

He  uttered  a  half  suppressed  groan  of  pain.  "Yes,"  he  said. 
"With  }^ou  close  to  me  like  that,  I  can't  think  of  anything — I 
don't  know  anything  but  .  .  . 

She  pulled  off  her  woolen  glove  and  slipped  her  cold  little 
hand  into  his  and  somehow  it  pulled  him  together  again.  He 
bent  down  and  pressed  his  lips  into  the  palm  of  it.  "I've 
never  even  touched  it  before  outside  the  regular  polite  ways. 
But,  oh,  my  dear,  you've  no  idea  how  many  times  I  haven't 
done  it." 

She  smiled  dissent  to  that.  "I've  known  every  time,  I 
think,"  she  said. 

Suddenly  he  pulled  her  up  into  his  arms;  bent  down  and 
found  her  lips,  in  a  long  embrace. 

At  the  conclusion  of  it  she  slipped  back  to  her  seat  beside 
him.  "I'm  glad  that  happened,"  she  said  presently.  "I  sup 
pose,  if  we  have  to,  we  can — live  on  it  for  a  long  while.  Years. 
Or  forever,  maybe.  Though  I  can't  manage  to  believe  that, 
can  you?  But  it's  settled  one  thing,  anyway.  We  can't  go 
on — half  together  and  half  apart." 

"Yes,  it's  settled  that,"  he  said. 

But  it  was  surprising,  after  that,  how  easily  and  quietly 
they  slipped  into  talk;  one  of  her  hands  in  his  once  more. 
There  was  no  tragic  note  about  it,  though  it  was  their  separa 
tion  they  mostly  talked  about. 

Jean,  it  happened,  could  go  away  very  accountably,  without 
any  fuss,  and  without  awakening  any  surmises.  Both  her 
mother  and  her  grandmother  were  getting  restive;  the  older 
woman  to  escape  the  cold,  and  the  younger  woman  to  go  back 


THE   "WHITE   ARC  347 

to  her  husband.  Their  two  desires  intersected  at  San  An 
tonio,  and  both  of  them  had  spoken  tentatively  to  Jean  about 
the  project.  All  it  needed  was  her  own  enthusiastic  approba 
tion  of  it. 

"That's  as  good  as  California,"  she  said.  "If  it  was  Xew 
York,  we'd  always  be  riding  back  and  forth  for  little  glimpses 
of  each  other.  And  it's  got  to  be  a  real  separation  to  do  any 
good.  And  you  can't  go  away.  You've  got  to  stay  and  dis 
cover  Corbettite." 

"It's  a  funny  thing,"  he  said.  "I  quit  the  laboratory  yes 
terday  afternoon,  more  discouraged  about  it  than  I've  been  in 
six  months;  went  home  with  the  idea  that  I  was  just  about 
ready  to  give  up ;  thought  that  about  the  best  thing  I  could  do 
was  to  follow  Carter  over  to  France.  "Well,  it's  certain  that  I 
haven't  thought  about  it  since,  because  it  was  as  soon  as  I 
got  home  that  Helena  and  I  had  our  row.  But  I've  got  an 
idea  now.  I  had  it  last  night  when  I  went  back  to  the  labora 
tory.  I  know,  because  I  remember  slamming  the  door  on  it. 
I've  a  notion  it's  a  real  clew.  It  must  have  just  followed  along, 
somehow,  in  the  trail  of  the  other  discovery." 

She  laughed  happily  at  that.  Then,  "I  don't  know  why 
I'm  not  crying,"  she  said.  "I  would  be,  if  it  was  anybody  but 
you  that  I  was  in  love  with  and  was  going  to  have  to — do 
without — for  a  while." 

Voices  of  the  long-forgotten  secret-service  men  now  became 
audible  up  on  the  crest  of  the  bluff,  and  presently,  here  and 
there,  a  head  peered  over.  They'd  been  baffled  by  the  tracks 
it  seemed  and  resorted  to  drag-net  methods. 

"We'll  surrender,"  Hugh  called  up  to  young  Francis. 
"Though  I'd  have  got  her  away  in  my  submarine  if  it  hadn't 
been  for  the  ice.  You  stay  up  there  and  I'll  bring  her  up 
by  the  road." 

He  agreed  with  her  about  the  strangeness  of  the  paradox 
she  had  been  talking  about  when  the  boys  appeared.  He  felt 
the  same  way  about  it.  Curiously  happy,  content,  elated, 
secure — even  in  the  face  of  their  parting.  "I  don't  know 
anything  about  love,"  he  said.  "I  suppose  it  must  be  a  thing 
one  can  study  and  get  to  be  an  authority  about  But  there 


348  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

must  be  two  kinds  of  it,  anyway.  One  that  can  only  hurt. 
And  one  that  can  only — bless.  Even — even,  Jean  darling, 
when  we  give  it  up." 

They  were  around  the  corner,  by  now;  at  the  foot  of  the 
ravine  road.  The  whole  pack  of  little  boys  was  audibly  com 
ing  down,  pell-mell,  but  they  were  still  a  turn  or  two  of  the 
road  away. 

"Once  more  ?"  he  asked.    "They  aren't  here  yet." 

"It  doesn't  matter.    This  is  good-by." 

So  their  lips  met  once  more. 


CHAPTER  XXVII 

H,  wait  just  a  moment/'  Hugh  heard  Brigham  saying, 
evidently  into  tlie  telephone.  "I  think  this  is  he  com- 
ing  in  now."  Then,  turning  around  and  seeing  that 
he  had  guessed  right,  he  told  Hugh  that  Mrs.  Corbett  was 
on  the  wire  for  him. 

"My  mother,  or  my  wife?"  Hugh  asked,  and  learned  that 
it  was  Helena. 

This  was  around  three  o'clock  on  Saturday  afternoon.  He 
was  just  back  from  Lake  Forest — from  Jean — from  his  great 
voyage  of  discovery ! 

He  didn't  want  to  talk  to  Helena  yet.  Didn't  want  to 
think  about  her.  But  this  was  one  of  those  compulsory  situa 
tions  which  leave  no  choice.  Had  he  come  in  at  any  other 
moment,  except  when  his  wife  was  actually  on  the  wire,  he 
could  have  avoided  her  with  a  blanket  instruction  that  he  was 
going  to  be  very  busy  and  should  not  be  called  for  anybody. 
He  had  done  that  often  enough  before  now. 

But  it  wasn't  possible  to  say  to  Brigham,  "I  won't  talk  to 
my  wife."  He  said,  "All  right,"  instead ;  hung  up  his  hat  and 
overcoat  to  give  Brigham  time  to  get  out  of  the  room,  and  sat 
down  before  the  instrument.  The  last  time  he  had  heard  her 
voice,  it  had  cried  out  in  frantic  exasperation:  "Oh,  don't 
go  on  standing  there !  Go !  Go  away !" 

There  was  none  of  that  quality  in  it  now,  as  it  came  over 
the  wire.  She  meant  it,  apparently,  to  sound  good-humored 
and  casual,  to  match  her  words.  But  his  ear  detected  a  sup 
pressed  excitement  in  it — a  sort  of  reckless  hilarity — a  ring  of 
challenge. 

"I  tried  to  get  you  earlier,"  she  said,  "but  they  told  me  you 
weren't  in." 

349 


350  AN   AMEKICAN    FAMILY 

He  answered  that  they  had  told  her  the  truth.  He  had  been 
out  all  the  morning.  She  then  asked  if  he  meant  to  be  home 
to  dinner,  and  he  told  her  no. 

"That's  just  as  you  like,  of  course,"  she  said.  "But  I'm 
expecting  a  visitor— an  old  friend.  Quite  a  good  friend.  He's 
getting  in  on  a  train  from  the  Coast,  late  this  afternoon.  I 
don't  know  how  long  he'll  stay,  but  probably  several  days." 

"All  right,"  Hugh  said.  "Nevertheless  I  shan't  be  home  to 
dinner.  I'm  starting  a  piece  of  work  here  now  that  will  keep 
me  pretty  constantly  occupied  for  some  time.  I  don't  know- 
when  I  shall  be  home." 

"Do  as  you  like  about  it,"  she  said  satirically,  then  added : 
"If  you'd  come  home  last  night,  you'd  have  found  a  note  from 
me  on  your  pillow."  Then,  after  an  instant's  silence,  he 
heard  her,  "Good-by,  Hugh,"  and  the  click  of  disconnection 
as  she  hung  up. 

He  pushed  the  instrument  away,  but  remained  staring  at 
it  for  a  moment  in  an  uneasy  abstraction.  Something  admon 
ished  him  that  he'd  gone  wrong.  The  sensation  was  so  sharp 
and  clear  that  it  was  as  if  he  had  been  spoken  to  in  audible 
words.  "Go  home.  Have  it  out  with  her  now." 

All  the  way  back  to  town  on  the  train,  an  idea  had  been 
knocking  at  the  door  of  his  mind,  without  ever  getting  full 
admission;  the  idea  that  he  must,  of  course,  come  to  some 
sort  of  understanding  with  Helena.  It  was  unthinkable  that 
he  could  continue  on  terms  of  marital  intimacy  with  her,  and, 
sometime,  if  not  at  once,  that  fact  would  have  to  be  made 
explicit.  The  situation,  in  so  far  as  she  was  involved  in  it, 
was  one  to  be  faced  and  dealt  with,  not  merely  retreated  from. 

He  had  recognized  this  visitor  on  the  door-step  as  one  fully 
entitled  to  admission  and  serious  entertainment.  Only  not 
now;  not  to-day.  To-day  he  had  something  else  to  think  about. 

He  was  not  thinking  about  Jean.  The  new  ozone  that  he 
breathed  was  Jean,  the  exultant  rhythm  of  his  pulse  was 
Jean,  and  the  new  light  that  transfigured  the  world.  But  the 
engine  of  his  thoughts,  running  swifter  and  more  smoothly 
than  ever  it  had  run  before,  the  full  dynamic  force  of  his 
imagination,  was  at  work  on  Corbettite. 


THE   WHITE    ARC  351 

It  was  odd  about  that.  He  had  been  working  for  months, 
with  a  patience  he  had  described  to  Jean  on  the  day  of  her 
visit  to  the  laboratory,  as  something  less  than  human,  without 
gaining  a  single  step.  He  had  gone  over  the  old  ground  again 
and  again;  repeating  experiments,  checking  old  data,  method 
ically  sweeping  the  whole  area  of  possibilities  as  an  astrono 
mer  sweeps  for  comets.  This  was  a  familiar  experience,  of 
course,  but  it  had  never  been  so  hard  as  it  had  been  this 
winter.  Life  had  got  a  new  urgency.  His  fence  no  longer 
shut  out  the  world.  That  was  Jean,  of  course,  though  he 
didn't  know  it.  Disappointment  had  a  new  poignancy.  The 
successive  frustrations  of  his  search  became  more  nearly  in 
tolerable.  The  impulse  he  had  avowed  to  Jean,  down  there 
on  the  beach,  to  chuck  the  whole  thing  and  go  to  France,  to 
do  something — serviceable,  was  one  that  had  often  assailed 
him. 

But  he  had  stuck  doggedly  to  the  task  that  seemed  to  be 
his,  whipping  his  tired  mind  back  to  work  as  often  as  it  re 
volted.  It  should  know  no  rest  during  the  longest  working 
hours  it  could  be  made  to  endure,  until  Corbettite  was  a 
fully  accomplished — fully  understood  thing. 

But  out  there  in  Lincoln  Park  last  night,  in  all  the  chaos 
of  his  rage  and  bewilderment,  in  the  very  vortex  of  the  tem 
pest,  as  he  had  stood  for  a  moment  staring  at  the  spectrum 
refracted  by  a  swirling  cloud  of  snow-crystals  round  an  arc- 
light,  something,  in  a  flash,  came  to  him.  He  ignored  it  so 
completely  that  his  only  conscious  and  memorable  mental 
process  on  reaching  the  laboratory  had  been,  as  he  described 
it  to  Jean,  the  slamming  of  a  door  upon  it.  Something  was 
there,  but  he  would  be  damned  if  he  would  look  at  it  now ! 

It  was  not  until  Jean  told  him  that  she  must  be  the  one 
to  go  away — that  he  must  stay  and  complete  the  discovery  of 
Corbettite — that  he  thought  of  it  again.  And  even  then,  he 
did  not  take  out  his  clew  and  look  at  it.  Simply  reminded 
himself  once  more  that  it  was  there,  with  an  increasing  con 
fidence,  born  of  the  strange  exultation  of  that  moment,  that 
it  was  good. 

He  stayed  to  lunch  with  the  birthday  party.    Ngt  at  all  be- 


352  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

cause  of  the  inferences  which  his  failure  to  do  so  would  have 
suggested  to  Miss  Muirhead,  but  simply  because  he  wanted 
to.  It  had  been  a  hard  thing  to  do,  of  course.  But  it  was 
the  sort  of  hard  thing  he  gloried  in  doing.  He  took  an  im 
mense  pride  in  devoting  his  attention,  whole-heartedly,  to  the 
little  boys;  in  offering  suggestions  for  their  afternoon's  en 
tertainment,  that  were  received  with  riotous  joy  and  the  tem 
pering  regret  that  he  could  not  stay  to  share  them.  He  looked 
at  Jean  and  talked  to  her,  without  a  stolen  glance,  or  a  veiled 
meaning. 

"It's  a  good  thing,  in  a  way,  that  it's  us  it  happened  to/' 
Jean  had  said,  "because  we'll  stand  it."  She  was  as  confi 
dent  of  him,  that  meant,  as  she  was  of  herself.  Well,  that 
confidence  should  be  justified. 

It  was  Philip's  suggestion  that  the  whole  party,  including 
Miss  Muirhead  and  Jean,  should  escort  him  to  the  train.  And, 
with  unanimous  consent,  this  thing  was  done.  On  the  station 
platform  it  happened  while  they  waited  that  some  mild  diver 
sion  drew  away  the  rest  and  left  Jean  and  Hugh  for  a  moment 
alone.  There  was  no  exchange  of  whispers;  no  fugitive  con 
tact  of  hands ;  not  even  a  meeting  of  eyes.  Just  an  infinitely 
gracious  silence.  That  was  their  parting  embrace. 

The  train  came  in,  he  mounted  the  steps  of  it,  and  his  part 
ing  look  and  wave  of  the  hand,  and  his  shouted  good-by,  went 
out  impartially  to  all  of  them. 

His  mood  was  antipodally  remote  from  the  melancholy 
despair  of  the  traditional  lover  bereft  of  his  mistress.  He 
even  afforded  the  recognition  of  this  fact  a  smile.  His  whole 
being  was  an  instrument  newly  set  in  tune,  and  tuned  to 
the  very  highest  pitch.  Last  night  he  had  dreamed.  To-day 
the  reality  had  outrun  his  dreams.  The  great  need  in  him 
was  for  something  hard  to  do.  Corbettite  met  that  need.  He 
had  gone  to  work  upon  it  before  the  train  was  fairly  out  of 
the  station. 

The  new  surmise  that  had,  unregarded,  found  lodgment  in 
his  mind  last  night — for  all  the  world  like  some  migratory 
bird  blown  in  on  the  tempest — suggested,  made  necessary,  a 
revision  of  all  he  had  done ;  put  a  whole  series  of  experiments 


THE    WHITE    ARC  353 

— the  labor  of  months — beside  the  mark  altogether;  called  for 
a  new  set  of  determinations. 

It  was  maddening  not  to  be  in  his  laboratory  now,  this  mo 
ment,  with  his  diagrams  and  tables  within  hand's  reach  (he 
vas  rroing  to  it,  of  course,  as  fast  as  the  train  would  carry 
him)  but  it  was  marvelous  how  his  memory  helped  him,  bring 
ing  him,  with  photographic  fidelity,  whole  pages  of  com 
putations.  Such  mnemonic  feats  are  not  so  very  uncommon. 
Hugh  knew  an  orchestra  leader  who  said  that  when  he 
conducted  from  memory  he  saw  the  pages  of  his  score 
photographed  like  that.  Only  it  was  a  power  he  had  never 
supposed  he  possessed.  But  he  had  never  worked  in  an  il 
lumination  like  this  before.  If  it  would  only  last  I 

So  far  as  he  could  see,  the  new  idea  was  right.  It  grew,  not 
like  a  plant,  in  however  rich  a  soil,  but  in  long  ramifying 
leaps,  like  a  pattern  in  frost  crystals  on  a  window  pane.  It 
might,  of  course,  prove  to  be  nothing  more  than  that.  Under 
the  pitiless  light  of  experiment  that  it  must  be  subjected  to, 
it  might  melt  away  to  nothing. 

The  man  he  once  had  been  would  have  pretended — and 
honestly  tried  to  feel — a  complete  indifference  concerning  the 
result  of  those  experiments.  The  cause  of  purely  scientific 
truth  would  equally  be  served  by  disproving  his  new  theory 
or  by  proving  it.  But  Hugh  had  forgotten  the  very  existence 
of  that  man.  The  hope  that  his  hypothesis  would  stand  the 
test  was  almost  agonizing  in  its  intensity. 

A  necessary  corollary  to  every  discovery  is  the  finding  of  the 
means  for  putting  it  to  the  proof.  Columbus  would  have 
dreamed  in  vain  of  that  western  passage  to  the  Indies,  if  he 
had  not  found  his  ships.  In  some  cases,  of  course,  the  means 
are  ready  at  hand,  and  obvious  of  application.  In  others, 
paradoxically,  it  is  the  means  that  lead  to  the  discovery.  The 
mere  having  of  the  ships  results  in  the  finding  of  America. 

But  this  case  of  Hugh's  fell  in  neither  of  these  categories. 
His  was  one  of  those  staggering  hypotheses  that  no  man  of 
science  would  consider  seriously  until  it  was  demonstrated 
up  to  the  hilt.  And  this  demonstration  demands  quite  a  dif 
ferent  set  of  qualities  from  those  which  produce  the  hypo- 


354  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

thesis  itself.  A  philosopher  might  have  reasoned  out  Cor- 
bettite — the  new  Corbettite.  Hugh,  having  imagined  it,  had 
still  to  make  it.  A  matter  of  technique,  that  was,  of  inge 
nuity  and  resourcefulness  and  skill.  Mechanic,  chemist,  elec 
trician — he  must  be  all  three,  beginning  where  the  philoso 
pher  in  him  left  off. 

Fortunately  for  him,  he  was  all  three.  And  he  attacked 
the  task  with  an  exultant  confidence.  Even  while  he  sat 
there  in  the  train,  he  was  scheming  out  the  means  in  terms  of 
metal,  crucibles,  electric  current  and  chemical  reaction,  for 
determining  this  factor  and  eliminating  that.  And,  by  the 
time  his  taxi  reached  the  laboratory,  the  preliminary  experi 
ments  were  all  decided  upon.  He  was  absolutely  incandescent 
with  eagerness  to  begin. 

That  being  his  mood,  it  seems  to  me  that  the  wonder  is, 
not  that  Helena's  veiled  hints  and  warnings,  her  note  of 
challenge,  her  contemptuous  "That's  as  you  like,  of  course," 
failed  to  bring  him  home,  on  guard  agairist  the  thing  she  ap 
peared  to  be  meditating  against  him,  but  that  an  uneasy 
thought  of  her  should,  even  for  a  moment  have  broken  in  upon 
his  preoccupation.  Not  that  he  failed  to  heed  the  voice  that 
spoke  in  his  ear  after  he  had  pushed  the  telephone  away,  but 
that  he  heard  it  at  all,  and  for  a  moment,  sat  staring  at  the 
instrument,  before,  springing  up,  he  called  his  two  assistants 
and  began  telling  them,  swiftly  and  eagerly,  what  they  were 
to  do. 


CHAPTER  XXVIII 

THE  relation  between  Constance  and  her  mother  did  not 
impress  either  the  family  or  their  friends  as  an  espe 
cially  intimate  one.  There  was  no  element  of  depend 
ence  in  it  on  either  side,  and  the  family  manners  didn't  run 
to  endearments.  But  the  fact  remains  that  well  within  a  week 
of  the  time  when  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Corbett  started  to  California, 
Constance  was  missing  her  mother  frightfully.  There  were 
times,  simply,  when  nobody  else  would  do;  things  that  no 
one  else  could  be  trusted  to  a  candid  talk  about. 

She  had  her  husband,  of  course.  In  most  perplexities  he 
was  admirable;  well  poised,  resourceful,  clear  as  a  bell.  But 
this  thing  he'd  take  either  too  lightly  or  too  hard.  If  he 
didn't  dismiss  it  as  nonsense — well,  there  was  no  telling  where 
he'd  stop.  He  might  prove  a  bull  in  a  china  shop. 

Frederica?  Somehow  it  didn't  seem  the  sort  of  thing  she 
could  confide  to  her,  oldest  friend  as  she  was.  And  anyway, 
what  good  would  it  do  ?  Freddy  would  be  shocked,  of  course, 
and  then  encouraging;  might  manage  to  persuade  her  that 
there  was  nothing  to  worry  about.  All  very  well  in  case  it 
turned  out  that  way,  but  in  that  event,  she  might  as  well  have 
kept  her  trouble  to  herself.  But  if  it  turned  out  the  other 
way — a  sickening,  ghastly  mess  that  some  action  of  hers  might 
just  possibly  have  averted — mitigated,  anyhow.  .  .  No,  not 
Frederica. 

Gregory  was  the  obvious  person  to  tarn  to,  of  course,  but — > 
thank  heaven ! — he  was  in  New  York.  When  he  came  home, 
which  would  be  within  the  next  few  days,  he  would  almost 
certainly  do  something.  Eileen  would  tell  him  how  it  looked 
to  her — she  was  simply  aghast  about  it — and  he  would  go 
charging  down  on  Hugh ;  a  bad  matter  made  worse !  Indeed 

355 


356  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

one  of  the  most  urgent  aspects  of  Constance's  perplexity  was 
whether  she  shouldn't  do  something  merely  to  forestall  Greg. 
"Do  something  V9  But  what  ?  What  did  she  want  to  do — or 
what  prevent?  Given  carte  blanche  by  the  Almighty  to  deal 
with  this  situation  as  she  chose,  how  would  she  deal  with  it? 
It  shocked  her  to  realize  that  she  didn't  know. 

This  was  not  at  all  like  Constance;  not  like,  at  least,  the 
Constance  her  friends  knew  and  she  herself — save  for  once  in 
the  proverbial  blue  moon — took  for  granted.  Common  sense 
and  good  humor  were  her  outstanding  qualities.  Her  mind — • 
a  good  dependable  sort  of  mind — was  not  at  all  given  to  specu 
lative  excursions.  Current  social  usage,  current  morality, 
had  about  the  same  place  in  her  conscious  life  of  every  day 
that  the  fences  beside  the  road  have  in  the  consciousness  of 
the  driver  of  a  motor-car.  You  can't  drive  over  them,  of  course, 
nor  through  them,  without  coming  to  smash.  But  then,  why 
should  you  want  to  try  ?  The  road  runs  between — doesn't  it — 
with  plenty  of  room  for  all  reasonable  purposes?  And  the 
sight  of  a  wrecked  car  here  and  there — if  this  be  not  straining 
my  tenuous  figure  too  far — the  sight  of  a  car  that  had  disas 
trously  tried  conclusions  with  the  fence  moved  her  not  to  in 
dignation  nor  to  unmixed  pity.  Puzzled  her,  rather,  as  a  case 
of  unaccountably  bad  driving. 

Fortunately,  though,  this  was  not  quite  the  whole  truth 
about  her.  She  was  redeemed  by  an  occasional  divine  misgiv 
ing.  Do  you  remember  a  talk  she  had  had,  years  before,  with 
Frederica  Whitney  ?  That  was  when  Hugh  had  gone  to  New 
York  to  find  that  anarchist  girl  he  was  infatuated  with,  and 
to  try  to  persuade  her  to  marry  him.  She'd  told  Frederica 
how  the  thing  looked  to  Jean,  and  had  enlarged  upon  the 
look  in  their  two  faces — the  child's  and  Hugh's;  contrasted 
it  with  the  look  in  Mother  Crawford's  face — old  Mrs.  Craw 
ford,  who  never  in  her  whole  life  had  made  a  fool  of  herself. 

That  same  old  perplexing  argument- — upon  the  merits  of 
making  a  fool  of  one's  self,  granted  the  occasion,  was  again 
distracting  Constance.  And  it  concerned  itself  with  the  same 
three  people  who  had  thrust  it  upon  her  before,  Hugh  and 
Jean  and  Helena. 


THE    WHITE    ARC  357 

This  time,  However,  the  triangle  was  sinister.  It  was  a 
double  triangle,  too.  There  was  a  man  of  Helena's  in  it.  It 
was  this  aspect  of  the  situation  that  all  the  scandal  was  about. 
It  was  this  that  had  horrified  Eileen  and  that  Gregory,  com 
ing  home  from  Kew  York  any  day  now,  might  be  expected  to 
try  to  deal  with  in  his  own  fashion.  Even  without  complica 
tions  it  was  ugly  enough;  by  no  means  just  "another  of 
Helena's  episodes." 

Helena  and  her  flirtations  had  been  a  fruitful  theme  for 
gossip,  since  the  very  early  days  of  the  marriage — since  the 
days  of  Boyd  Barr  and  the  Red  Review.  Helena  was  always 
making  a  fad  of  somebody;  usually  a  sojourner,  who,  if  he 
did  not  actually  live  in  her  house  during  the  whole  period 
of  his  stay  in  the  city,  at  least  made  himself  very  much  at 
home  there  and  was  to  be  found  about  the  premises  at  the 
unlikelieet  hours. 

The  prevalent  notion  was  that  you  were  always  likely  to 
stumble  upon  some  sort  of  masculine  exotic  when  you  went 
to  Helena's.  She  had  always  made  a  great  parade  of  them; 
rammed  them  down  the  throats  of  her  friends,  insisted  that 
people  read  their  poetry,  or  go  to  their  lectures  and  exhibi 
tions.  Her  manners  toward  them  were  usually  familiar — 
would  have  been  judged  intolerably  so,  but  for  the  fact  that 
familiar  manners  were  the  new  thing  an}rhow.  And  they  were 
often,  these  men  of  Helena's,  flagrantly  sentimental  about  her. 
And  all  that,  taken  in  connection  with  Hugh's  hermit-like 
ways,  made  a  lively  topic  for  talk. 

But  she  had  never,  in  any  of  these  affairs,  gone  beyond  a 
certain  loosely  drawn  but  quite  visible  line.  It  was  always 
possible  to  talk  about  them  jocularly — with  an  air  of  jocu 
larity,  anyhow. 

But  this  new  thing  that  was  happening  at  Hugh's  house, 
didn't  fit  on  in  that  series  at  all.  No  one  knew  who  the 
man  was  who  had  been  there  all  the  week.  He  had  been  there 
though,  it  appeared,  ever  since  late  last  Saturday  afternoon. 
And  nobody  knew  where  Hugh  was,  except  that  by  Helena's 
own  statement,  he  had  not  been  at  home  since  Sunday  morn 
ing  anyhow.  Helena  in  that  time  had  hardly  gone  out  at  all  5 


358  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 


had  broken  or  defaulted  most  of  her  engagements.  She  had 
told  a  few  insolently  transparent  lies  about  where  she  was 
going  and  where  she  had  been.  Not  many  people  knew,  to 
be  sure,  quite  how  bad  it  was.  Xo  one,  Constance  thought, 
outside  Eileen  and  herself.  But  even  the  glints  of  the  situa 
tion,  which  their  friends  had  got,  had  been  ugly  enough — not 
to  start  gossip  going,  but  to  stop  it  short.  It  was  as  bad  as 
that. 

What  Eileen  and  Constance  knew  was  absolutely  damning. 
It  was  no  wonder  pretty  little  Eileen  was  aghast.  Where 
was  Hugh?  What  was  he  doing?  What  was  he  thinking  of 
to  let  his  honor  be  outraged  like  that  ? 

Yes,  it  was  bad  enough.  But  it  was  not  what  horrified — 
fascinated  Constance.  Constance  was  afraid  she  knew  what 
he  was  thinking  of. 

It  had  been  on  the  Sunday  morning  after  Philip's  birthday 
that  she  began  looking  at  Jean  and  wondering  what  it  was 
about  the  girl  that  made  her  different.  She  couldn't  satis 
factorily  express  it  to  herself  and  attempted,  intermittently, 
to  make  herself  believe  that  it  was  all  her  own  imagination 
ptimulated  by  her  worries  about  Hugh  and  Helena,  which 
had  already,  that  morning,  begun.  The  effect  produced  by 
that  childish  observation  of  Philip's  shouldn't  be  taken  as 
evidence  of  anything.  Frank  had  been  right  to  treat  it — as 
he  had — with  a  chuckle  of  pure  amusement. 

The  birthday  party  had  come  back  to  town,  packed  into 
one  big  motor-car,  and,  arrived  at  the  Bush  Street  house,  the 
little  boy  had  begge-d  Jean  to  come  in,  as  a  last  protraction  of 
the  party.  When  she  went  home,  it  would  all  be  over.  Jean, 
after  learning  by  telephone  that  her  mother  and  grandmother 
were  both  at  church,  consented  to  assist  in  the  recital  to 
Frank  and  Constance  of  the  glorious  deeds  that  had  been  done 
at  Lake  Forest;  the  battles  and  stratagems  in  the  snow;  the 
nocturnal  pillow  fights  and  feasts,  in  all  of  which,  it  appeared, 
Jean  had  fully  participated.  She  could  hardly  have  been  a 
whole-hearted  ally  of  Miss  Muirhead's. 

The  fact  that  Hugh  had  turned  up,  on  Saturday,  for  lunch 
was  of  course  elicited,  the  fertility  of  his  suggestions  dwelt 


THE   WHITE    ARC  359 

upon,  and  a  passionate  regret  expressed  that  he  had  not  been 
invited  for  the  entire  period  of  the  party  and  had  callously  in 
sisted  on  going  home  again  so  soon  after  his  arrival. 

Constance  didn't  take  that  circumstance  very  seriously; 
told  herself  it  was  just  like  Hugh,  and  was  disposed  to  let 
it  go  at  that.  That  was  not,  at  all  events,  what  started  her 
looking  at  Jean.  It  did  remind  her  that  she  had  been  looking 
at  Jean  and  seeing  something  different  about  her  ever  since 
she  came  into  the  house.  It  was  after  a  short  reflective  silence 
on  Philip's  part,  that  he  threw  his  bomb.  He  had  his  hands 
in  his  pockets  and  stood  looking  at  Jean. 

"Why  don't  you  get  married  to  Uncle  Hugh?"  he  asked. 
"I  wish  you  would." 

I  don't  suppose  it  was  more  than  a  second  before  Constance 
undertook  an  explanation  of  how  the  monogamous  arrange 
ment  of  society  stood  fatally  in  the  way  of  the  project. 

"Well,"  Philip  insisted,  "I  wish  you  would,  anyway." 

Whereupon  Jean — with  a  smile,  to  be  sure — asked,  "Why  ?" 

But  evidently  her  question  rang  true  to  Philip;  did  not 
strike  him,  that  is,  as  one  of  those  adult  attempts  to  betray 
him  into  saying  something  that  could  be  laughed  at,  for  he 
made  a  serious  attempt  to  answer  it. 

"Well,  of  course,"  he  said,  "if  you  and  Uncle  Hugh  lived 
together  by  yourselves — not  with  grandmother  or  Aunt  Helena 
— why,  that  would  be  an  awfully  nice  place  for  me  to  go  to 
visit." 

This  was  said  a  little  dubiously,  as  if  it  were,  after  all,  a 
secondary  consideration,  the  primary  one  remaining  to  be 
formulated.  But  he  got  no  further,  for  at  that  point,  Con 
stance,  having  got  her  breath  again,  interrupted  vigorously. 
Frank,  as  I  said,  did  nothing  but  chuckle. 

Well,  perhaps  that  was  the  way  to  have  taken  it.  But  Con 
stance  found  she  couldn't  dismiss  it  like  that.  It  was  nothing, 
of  course,  that  Jean  had  remained  speechless  for  rather  a  long 
second  after  Philip  threw  his  bomb.  She  might  well  enough 
have  gasped,  or  flushed,  or  laughed  a  little  self-consciously. 
She  had  done  none  of  those  things.  Her  silence  hadn't 
seemed  like  the  result  of  shock  at  all.  It  almost  gave  Con- 


360  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

stance  the  impression  that  she  was  considering  the  child's 
question  seriously.  That  notion,  unbelievable  as  it  was,  was 
fairly  rammed  home,  a  minute  or  two  later,  by  Jean's  serious, 
though  smiling,  "Why?"  She  had  wanted  the  boy's  answer. 

It  was  then  that  Constance  got,  for  the  first  time,  and  full  in 
the  face,  the  horrifying  surmise  that  had  been  tormenting  her. 
all  the  week.  She  dashed  it,  indignantly,  out  of  her  mind. 
But  it  attacked  again  and,  within  the  next  twenty-four  hours 
or  so,  had  dug  itself  in. 

Her  mother-in-law's  bulletin,  the  next  morning,  had  for 
its  chief  item  the  announcement  that  the  project  for  a  move 
to  San  Antonio  had  been  revived — this  time  by  Jean  herself, 
who  had  been  very  half-hearted  about  it  before.  Xow  she 
was  talking  impossibilities,  such  as  a  start  that  very  week. 
Within  a  day  or  two !  Of  course  it  would  be  at  least  a  fort 
night  before  they  could  hope  to  start. 

This  was  significant,  and  became  more  so  when  it  appeared 
later  that  Jean  had  persisted  in  her  attempt  to  hasten  their 
departure,  even  to  the  point  of  irritating  her  grandmother 
into  a  doubt  whether  she  would  go  at  all.  This  wasn't  a  bit 
like  Jean.  Obviously  something  had  happened. 

There  was  nothing  exalted,  though,  or  entranced  about  the 
girl's  actions.  She  went  about  where  she  was  supposed  to  go, 
responded  alertly  enough  to  all  the  social  demands  that  were 
made  upon  her — conversational  and  other.  Constance  noted 
that  Hugh  had  dropped  out  of  her  talk,  that  she  had  not 
seen  him  since  the  birthday  party,  nor  had  any  communication 
with  Helena.  She  must  have  heard  some  of  the  gossip  from 
her  grandmother  who  simply  battened  on  fare  like  that,  but 
she  never  came  to  Constance  with  it,  and  when  Constance 
approached  the  subject  once  or  twice,  definitely  veered  away. 

These  facts,  as  far  as  they  went,  were  evidence.  There 
had  been  some  sort  of  explosion  and  Jean  had  been  involved, 
if  no  farther  than  merely  by  her  knowledge  of  it ;  a  rude  ex 
pulsion  from  the  Arcady  she  and  Hugh  had  been  wandering  in. 
Her  unobtrusive  breaking  off  with  Hugh,  her  withdrawal  from 
Helena,  her  proposed  retreat  to  San  Antonio,  all  fitted  neatly 
into  that  pattern. 


THE    WHITE   ARC  361 

But  that  look  of  hers  did  not  fit  into  it.  It  was  not  the 
look  of  one  in  retreat;  not  the  look  of  one  who  contemplated 
the  barest  possibility  of  retreat.  It  was,  on  the  contrary,  the 
look  of  one  committed,  waiting  for  the  hour. 

It  fairly  took  possession  of  Constance  before  the  week  was 
over.  She  didn't  see  why  every  one  else  hadn't  noticed  it — • 
why  they  weren't  wondering  what  it  meant.  Finally  some  one 
else  did  notice  it.  This  was  at  the  concert  Friday  afternoon. 
On  the  spur  of  the  moment  she  had  gone  to  sit  in  the  Whit- 
neys'  box  with  Frederica  and  Rose  Aldrich. 

Rose  was  the  lure  here.  There  was  something — romantic 
about  that  young  woman.  They  had  always  found  her  so, 
ever  since  Rodney  had  electrified  them  all  by  marrying  her. 
People  spoke  of  her  as  thrilling,  and  with  a  very  happy  use 
of  a  much  abused  word.  And  now,  as  once  before,  approach 
ing  maternity  heightened  that  quality  in  her.  It  had  com 
pleted,  for  the  second  time,  the  conquest  of  Frederica.  Sit 
ting  by  her,  you  weren't  likely  to  think  about  anybody  else. 
And  Constance,  whose  thoughts  had  begun  spinning  in  a  cir 
cle  like  a  falling  airplane,  clutched  at  the  invitation  as  a 
rescue — temporary,  anyhow. 

But  it  didn't  work  out  that  way.  Rose  sat  where  she  could 
look  across  the  circle  into  the  Crawfords'  box,  where  Jean  sat 
full  in  view.  Old  Mrs.  Crawford  was  there,  too,  falling  asleep 
as  she  always  did  (she  never  missed  the  concerts  when  she  was 
in  the  city;  evidently  got  some  sort  of  somnolent,  remote 
pleasure  out  of  them),  and  two  guests  of  hers.  But  it  was  to 
Jean's  face  that  Rose's  look  kept  going  back  during  the  whole 
immortal,  lovely  length  of  Schubert's  C-Major  Symphony  num 
ber  ten,  which  made  the  first  half  of  the  program.  In  the 
intermission,  she  said  to  Constance  something  about  what  a 
beauty  Jean  was  getting  to  be,  and  then  asked;  rather  sud 
denly  : 

"Is  she  going  back  to  France?" 

"Why,  no,"  Constance  said,  startled.  "Not  that  I  have 
heard  of.  Why?" 

"I  don't  know,"  Rose  answered  thoughtfully.  "It  was  just 
her  look,  I  guess,  that  made  me  think  of  it." 


362  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

So  it  wasn't  imagination ! 

They  rode  home  again  after  the  concert,  Jean  and  her 
grandmother,  in  Constance's  car,  and  at  the  carriage  door  of 
the  apartment,  Constance  said  to  Jean : 

"Do  you  want  to  come  back,  after  you  have  gone  up  with 
mother,  for  a  turn  in  the  Park  with  me?" 

She  made  a  point  of  asking  it  casually,  so  that  the  aid  lady 
wouldn't  decide  that  she'd  go  too.  But  it  was  plain  enough 
that  Jean  gave  the  suggestion  a  definite  meaning  and  im 
portance. 

She  nodded  and  said  simply,  "Yes." 

When  the  girl  was  once  more  seated  beside  her,  Constance 
said  into  the  tube  to  the  chauffeur, 

"Just  drive  along  north — toward  Evanston."  She  was  not 
quite  sure  what  the  little  sigh  Jean  gave  on  hearing  this 
direction  meant,  and  asked :  "That  isn't  more  of  a  turn  than 
you  bargained  for,  is  it?" 

"No,"  Jean  said,  "I'm  glad  we've — plenty  of  time." 

That  settled  the  preliminaries  then  and  there.  This  was 
going  to  be  a  real  talk — a  real  coming  to  grips.  Jean  both 
understood  and  invited  it.  But  for  a  few  minutes,  while  they 
were  rolling  through  the  Park,  Constance  hung  on  a  dead 
center.  She  had  her  opening  thought  out  well  enough,  but 
she  was  in  the  clutches  of  a  contradictory  impulse.  The 
youthful  loveliness  of  the  girl  at  her  side,  the  fine  straight 
grain  of  her,  the  spiritual — resilience,  affected  her  somewhat 
as  they  must  always  have  affected  Hugh.  Her  impulse,  mad 
of  course,  was  to  say ;  "Jean,  dear,  if  you  and  Hugh  are  lov 
ers,  and  don't  know  what  to  do,  count  me  in  on  your  side. 
I'll  help.  I'll  do  anything  you  want  me  to." 

She  entertained  the  notion  for  a  while,  in  silence,  as  I  have 
said.  Then,  with  a  movement  of  resolution,  a  stiffening  of 
her  moral  backbone,  she  began  as  she  had  meant  to  begin. 

"I  see  you  haven't  made  any  headway  with  your  grand 
mother  about  going  south." 

Jean  admitted  she  had  not.  "Grandmother's  theory  is,  ne 
matter  how  little  there  is  to  do  getting  ready  for  a  trip  like 
that,  it  takes  at  least  two  weeks  to  do  it." 


THE   WHITE   AEG  363 

Constance  drew  in  a  long  breath.  "Frank  can  get  you  off," 
she  said,  "if  I  tell  him  to.  If  you  want  to  go — now,  to-morrow. 
We'll  think  of  some  excuse  for  your  going  ahead.  Getting 
things  ready  for  your  mother.  I  suppose  that  wouldn't  be  a 
bad  idea,  really,  considering  how  fragile  Ethel  really  is.  Any 
how,  Frank  can  put  it  over." 

"But  that  wouldn't  do  me  any  good,"  Jean  said.  "It's 
mother  I  want  to  get  away  with."  She  reached  out  for  Con 
stance's  hand  and  clutched  it  tight.  "I  want  to  talk  with 
her,"  she  went  on,  an  edge  of  released  emotion  in  her  voice. 
"I  feel  as  if  I  had  to  talk  with  her.  The  doctors  keep  on 
saying  she  mustn't,  on  any  account,  be  excited  or  worried  by 
anything.  But  I  thought  if  she  could  be  back  with  father — 
with  him  to — hold  on  to,  it  wouldn't  be  so  bad."  She  smiled 
and  added,  "Nor  seem  so  serious  to  her.  But  you  see,  I 
couldn't  go  away  alone — leave  her  here — to  grandmother." 

"Jean  dear,"  said  Constance,  "would  talking  to  anybody 
else  do  you  any  good  ? — To  me  ?" 

The  girl  was  silent  for  a  moment.  Her  clutch  tightened  on 
Constance's  hand.  "Not  much,"  she  said.  "It  has  to  be 
mother.  For  my — feelings,  I  mean.  I  do  want  to  talk  to 
you,"  she  went  on,  "only  not  that  talk.  Because,  of  course, 
my  feelings  aren't  the  only  thing  in  the  world — even  to  me." 

For  the  present  then,  her  "feelings"  were  to  be  dismissed 
from  consideration — packed  in  their  box  and  locked  away. 
That  was  the  air  with  which  she  dried  her  eyes,  put  herself  a 
little  farther  back  on  the  cushions,  and — her  old  childish 
trick  which  Constance  remembered  with  a  clutch  of  the 
throat — squared  back  her  shoulders. 

"You  thought,"  she  said,  "that  I  wanted  an  excuse  for  get 
ting  away  quickly — for  running  away.  Is  there  any  .  .  . 
Do  you  know  any  reason  why  I  ought  to  run  away  ?" 

"I  don't  believe  so,"  said  Constance — rather  dubiously, 
though.  "Not  if  you  don't  know  of  any." 

"I  don't  know  whether  it's  safe  to  trust  to  that  or  not," 
Jean  said  after  a  little  silence.  "I  haven't  been  very  sensible 
this  winter,  I  don't  believe.  I  mean  there  are  things  I  ought 
to  have  geen,  that  I  haven't." 


364  AN   AMEKICAN   FAMILY 

It  was  with  an  apparent  effort  that  Constance  went  on. 
"Jean,"  she  asked,  "how  much  do  you  know  about  Helena? 
I  mean  about  what  she's  been  doing  lately — this  last  week?" 

Jean's  eyes  came  round  to  her,  wide  open.  "That  isn't  just 
gossip,  then?"  she  asked,  and  added:  "Why,  grandmother 
said  something  the  other  night.  But  I  didn't  think  it  was 
anything  anybody  knew.  And  I  didn't  much  want  to  listen. 
Not  because  I  don't  like  gossip  well  enough.  I  had  a  special 
reason." 

Constance  ruminated  over  that  a  moment,  not  quite  sure 
that  she  understood.  What  could  the  girl's  special  reason  be  ? 
If  she  was  in  love  with  Hugh — and  there  wasn't  much  room  for 
doubt  on  that  head  any  longer — hadn't  she  a  legitimate  ground 
of  interest  in  the  reported  misbehavior  of  Hugh's  wife  ?  But 
not  in  an  unfounded  rumor !  It  was  not  a  pretext  Jean  wanted. 
Nor  to  be  tempted  with  one.  That  was  it  of  course. 

"We  do  know,"  she  said.  "It's  all  true.  We  haven't  spied 
on  her.  It  was  really  by  accident  that  we  found  out.  Greg 
wanted  to  see  Hugh  before  he  went  to  New  York.  Tried  to 
find  him  and  couldn't.  There  was  some  paper  it  was  im 
portant  Hugh  should  sign.  Greg  told  Eileen  to  find  him 
and  get  it  done  as  quickly  as  she  could.  That  was  Sunday. 
She  drove  out  to  the  laboratory — found  it  locked  up  and  no 
body  let  her  in — if  any  one  was  there.  So  then  she  went  to 
his  house.  What  she  saw  made  it  all  plain  enough.  And  then 
there  are  things  that  have  happened  since.  I  can  go  into  the 
details  if  you  want  me  to,  but — " 

The  girl  shuddered,  then  steadied  herself.  "I'd  rather  you 
didn't,"  she  said. 

Constance,  after  a  reflective  silence,  her  gaze  fixed  on  the 
black  ellipse  of  her  chauffeur's  cap,  said : 

"I'd  have  talked  to  you  about  it  sooner,  but — I  had  an  idea 
you  knew." 

Jean  echoed  that  wonderingly.  "But  how  could  I  know?" 
she  asked. 

"I  thought,"  pursued  Constance,  finding  the  thing  more 
and  more  difficult  as  she  went  on,  "that  Hugh  might  have  told 
you." 


THE   WHITE    ARC  365 

"But  Hugh  doesn't  know!"  Jean  cried.  "I  don't  believe 
he  knows !" 

"I  think  he  must/'  Constance  said.  "Why  else  has  he  gone 
away? — Disappeared  like  that?" 

"Gone  away!"  echoed  Jean.  "I  didn't  know  he  had  gone 
away."  The  girl's  voice  wavered  over  that.  Constance  could 
hear  incipient  panic  in  it.  But  the  old  code  and  the  old  drill 
came  to  the  rescue.  She  squared  her  shoulders,  flattened  her 
back,  and  repeated  the  assertion  steadily.  "I  didn't  know 
that  he  had  gone  away.  Are  you  sure  ?" 

"I'm  not  sure  of  anything,"  Constance  admitted.  "Only 
Helena  says  herself  that  he  hasn't  been  home,  and  that's 
hardly  a  thing  that  she'd  lie  about.  And  when  we  try  to 
telephone  the  laboratory,  sometimes  they  don't  answer  at  all, 
and  sometimes  they  say  that  he's  not  there  and  that  they 
can't  tell  anything  about  him.  They'll  ask  him  to  call  us,  if 
he  comes  in.  And  he  never  does." 

"Well,"  Jean  said  steadily,  "I  don't  believe  he's  gone  away, 
and  I  don't  believe  he  knows.  And  I'm  sure  he  hasn't  gone 
away  because  he  knows.  That's  not  what  Hugh  would  do." 

"Xo,"  said  Constance,  "it  isn't  very  accountable.  But  then, 
this  that  Helena's  doing  isn't  very  accountable  either.  You 
wouldn't  think  she'd  do  a — crazy  thing  like  that,  a  perfectly 
reckless,  abandoned  thing  like  that.  .  ." 

She  didn't  add  the  word  "unless";  pulled  up  on  the  brink 
of  it.  But  Jean  caught  the  implication. 

"You  do  account  for  it  some  way,"  she  said.  "You've  got 
a  theory.  Tell  me  what  it  is." 

Constance  found  that  her  throat  had  gone  dry.  She  had 
never  had  to  say  so  hard  a  thing  before. 

"Yes,  I  have  a  theory,"  she  said  at  last.  "That's  the  whole 
thing,  really.  What  I  wanted  to  talk  to  you  about.  You 
mustn't  hate  me  for  this.  You  wouldn't  even  be  angry  with 
me  for  it,  if  you  knew  how  I  felt. 

"Jean,  it  worried  mother — my  mother,  I  mean — away  back 
last  fall,  just  after  you  came  home,  the  way  Helena  seemed 
to  be  deliberately  throwing  you  and  Hugh  together — 'throwing 
you  at  his  head' — was  how  mother  put  it.  She  thought  Helena 


366  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

might  be  doing  it  for  some  detestable  purpose  of  her  own.  I 
tried  to  laugh  her  out  of  it.  I  never  liked  Helena  very  well, 
but  I  didn't  believe  she  was  capable  of  anything  like  that. 

"Well,  I  believe,  now,  she's  capable  of  anything — of  trying 
it,  anyhow.  And  I've  been  wondering — if  she  succeeded.  I 
couldn't  help  wondering.  I  don't  see  how  she  could  have 
thrown  away  all  she's  got  in  the  world,  her  position — every 
thing,  for  a  shabby  little  transient  love  affair.  I  can't  believe 
she'd  have  risked  it,  unless  she  has  something  she  thinks  will 
protect  her — some  sort  of  threat  against  Hugh  that  would 
make  him  keep  quiet — pretend  not  to  see. 

"And  the  only  threat  I  can  think  of  that  would  work  that 
way,  would  be  one  that  involved  you — with  him.  .  ." 

She  stopped  there,  not  quite  sure  whether  she  had  gone  far 
enough.  Did  the  girl  understand?  Did  her  life  afford  her 
the  data  for  understanding  a  monstrous  supposition  like  that  ? 
And  if  she  understood,  how  had  she  taken  it? 

There  was  nothing  in  the  silence  to  afford  her  a  clew,  and 
her  courage  faltered  from  looking  round  into  the  girl's  face. 
Finally  she  said — and  the  words  were  almost  a  cry: 

"Jean,  darling,  do  you  understand  what  I  mean  ?" 

"Yes,  I  understand  of  course,"  Jean  said  quietly.  "I  was 
thinking." 

Then  Constance  did  look  round,  amazed. 

There  was  no  look  of  anger  or  hurt  in  the  girl's  face;  no 
expression  of  horror,  or  even  of  protest.  The  attitude  of  her 
body,  the  poise  of  her  head,  was  tensely  alert.  Her  gaze  was 
fixed  out  the  window  in  concentrated  thought. 

"I  don't  know  how  much  one  needs  to  make  a  scandal  of," 
she  went  on,  at  last,  in  that  quiet  voice — "not  very  much,  I 
suppose.  And  still  less  to  threaten  one.  But  there's  nothing 
that  Helena  knows,  or  can  have  been  told,  by  any  one  who's 
telling  the  truth,  that's  any  different  from  what  yon  know 
about  us,  yourself." 

The  phrase  struck  Constance  as  curious,  but  in  an  instant 
she  understood.  (Her  own  mind  was  keyed  to  a  much  higher 
pitch  than  her  normal  one.)  All  Jean  saw,  all  there  was  room 
for  in  her  mind  at  that  moment  was  Helena.  She  was  eying 


THE   WHITE    ARC  367 

her  as  one  might  eye  a  movement  in  the  grass  where  one 
suspects  a  snake.  It  hadn't  occurred  to  her  to  protest  her 
innocence  to  Constance.  It  was  only  from  that  latter  point  of 
view  that  the  use  of  the  phrase  might  have  seemed  evasive. 
So  it  was  all  right  after  all ! 

But  just  as  the  older  woman  was  drawing  in  her  first  long 
breath  of  genuine  relief,  a  gasp  from  Jean  checked  her.  She 
looked  round  again  in  time  to  see  a  flame  of  color  leap  into 
the  girl's  face. 

"Why,  Jean!"  she  cried.    "What  is  it?" 

It  was  a  matter  of  seconds  before  she  got  an  answer.  Then, 
"There's  nothing  that  anybody  knows — except  what  nobody 
knows  but  Hugh  and  me.  Unless  he  told  her — that  same  day 
that  it  happened.  Saturday.  After  he  went  back  from  Lake 
Forest.  I — I  wasn't  thinking  about  that." 

There  was  a  long  silence  after  that.  Constance  had  sim 
ply  gone  limp.  As  for  Jean,  she  showed  no  disposition  to 
add  anything  to  the  amazing  admission  she  had  just  made, 
either  by  way  of  explaining  or  qualifying  it.  Her  mind,  so 
far  as  Constance  could  sense  from  the  way  she  sat  there,  so 
still  and  so  alertly  poised,  seemed  to  have  gone  back  to  the 
consideration  of  Helena  once  more. 

Finally  Constance  said:  "Jean  dear,  won't  you  go  away? 
Just  as  soon  as  it  can  possibly  be  done.  To-morrow.  Don't 
you  think  Hugh  would  feel  better  if  you  were  safely  out  of 
the  way?  She's  terribly  dangerous.  Especially  if  Hugh  has 
told  her— what — whatever  there  was  to  tell.  And  if  she's 
threatened  him  with  making  a  scandal  of  it  .  .  ." 

"I  don't  believe  that's  it  at  all,"  Jean  interrupted.  "I  don't 
think  he's  seen  her  since  they  quarreled  last  Friday  night. 
There  was  some  terribly  important  work  he  meant  to  do  at 
the  laboratory,  and  I  think  he  went  straight  back  to  that.  I 
think  he's  been  there  all  the  time.  And  I  don't  think  he 
knows  what  Helena's  been  doing.  If  I  knew  that  was  so, 
I'd  go  away.  I  told  him  I  would  go,  and  I  think  he'll  expect 
to  find  me  gone  when  he  comes  out  of  the  laboratory.  But 
I'm  not  going.  !N~ot  as  long  as  there's  a  chance  that  she's 
done  what  you  think.  If  she's  done  that,  he  must  fight,  of 


368  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

course.  And  I  must  stay  and  help  him.  I'm  about  the 
only  one  who  can.  Why,  it  would  be  admitting  I've  done 
;wrong,  to  run  away ! — Shall  we  go  home  now  ?" 

Constance  weakly  assented.  To  say  that  she  had  got  out 
beyond  her  depth  is  an  utterly  inadequate  way  of  putting  it. 
She  felt  as  if  she  had  come  through  a  mill-race.  But  along 
with  her  sense  of  her  own  complete  helplessness  there  came  a 
curious  confidence  that  her  young  niece  was  not  going  down 
to  shipwreck.  Storm-battered  she  was,  no  doubt,  going  to  be ; 
she  would  probably  lose  a  sail  or  two.  But  the  essentials  of 
her  were  going  to  come  through  intact.  When  they  clasped 
hands,  it  was  Constance  who  was  clinging  to  Jean,  not  Jean 
who  was  clinging  to  Constance.  That  was  the  way  it  felt 
to  the  older  woman  at  any  rate. 

They  didn't  say  much  all  the  way  home;  not  a  word  that 
bore  on  the  subject  that  was  in  both  their  minds,  until,  the 
chauffeur  having  taken  the  inner  drive  through  the  Park  and 
turned  down  Astor  Street,  they  passed  Gregory's  house. 

"I've  been  glad  he  was  away,"  Constance  said,  "and  dread 
ing  his  coming  back.  Because  there's  sure  to  be  an  explosion 
when  he  does.  But  I'm  beginning  to  wish  he  would." 

"He  came  to-day,  I  think,"  Jean  said.  "At  least,  Eileen 
was  expecting  him  this  noon,  when  I  saw  her.  He'd  tele 
graphed  or  something." 

It  was  with  an  equal  mixture  of  relief  and  apprehension 
that  Constance  deceived  this  news.  "I  wish  it  were  to-morrow 
at  this  time,"  she  said,  "and  nothing — terrible  had  happened." 

Jean  left  her  with  a  reassuring  hug  and  an  affectionate 
kiss.  It  was  a  strange  reversal  of  roles,  for  a  fact. 

Nevertheless,  the  young  girl  paused  outside  the  door  of 
their  apartment,  for  a  steadying  breath  or  two,  and  then  she 
rummaged  in  her  wrist-bag  for  her  latch-key,  in  preference 
to  ringing  and  having  to  face  the  maid. 

She  walked  swiftly  across  the  hall  and  down  the  corridor 
to  her  own  bedroom.  Arrived  at  this  haven,  she  allowed 
herself  just  one  moment's  indulgence  in  the  friendly  darkness 
of  it  before  switching  on  the  lights,  or  ridding  herself  of  her 
outdoor  wraps  and  changing  to  a  house  frock  for  dinner. 


THE    WHITE   ARC  369 

This  moment  of  "recollection"  was  broken  in  upon  by  the 
jangle  of  the  telephone  bell.  She  started  at  it  and  sat  breath 
less,  listening  with  strained  ears.  She  had  done  that,  poor 
child,  since  Sunday  morning,  every  time  the  telephone  bell  had 
rung.  The  apartment  was  very  quiet,  and  the  voice  that  an 
swered — that  of  one  of  the  servants — though  faint,  was  audi 
ble. 

"xvTo,  sir,"  it  said,  "Miss  Gilbert  has  not  come  in.  She  re 
turned  from  the  concert  and  went  out  again.  .  .  Oh,  no, 
sir.  She's  not  left  the  city.  She's  expected  for  dinner." 

Jean  snatched  up  the  extension  that  was  in  her  room — one 
of  those  little  English  instruments  with  the  receiver  and 
transmitter  all  in  one  piece.  The  way  her  face  nestled  to  it 
was  a  caress.  But  she  said  steadily  enough,  "I've  just  come  in, 
Mills.  I'll  answer  from  here." 

There  was  a  dead  silence  over  the  wire  for  an  instant  after 
the  click  which  told  that  the  other  receiver  had  been  hung  up. 
And  then,  in  Hugh's  voice — the  voice  she  had  been  so  certain 
she  would  hear: 

"I  was  afraid  you'd  have  gone  before  this."  And  in  the  mo 
ment  before  she  answered,  "You're  there,  aren't  you  ?" 

"Yes,"  she  said.  "Only  my  voice  wouldn't  come,  for  a 
minute.  You're  there,  too  ?  At  the  laboratory  ?  You  haven't 
gone  away,  either  ?" 

"Gone  away !"  he  echoed.  "I  should  think  not !  I  haven't 
had  my  head  out-of-doors  since  last  Saturday  afternoon.  Jean, 
I've  got  it !  I've  had  it  ever  since  three  o'clock  Monday  morn 
ing.  Since  then  I've  just  been  making  sure.  I  swore  I 
wouldn't  call  you  till  I  was.  But  I've  checked  it  every  possi 
ble  way.  There  isn't  a  doubt  about  it.  The  job's  done !" 

"Oh !"  she  said,  breathless.  "Oh,  I  wish  we  didn't  have  to 
—talk!" 

Evidently  it  was  as  difficult  for  him  as  it  was  for  her.  At 
last  he  said,  "Jean,  can  we  see  each  other  again  ?  Once  more 
before  you  go  away  ?  I  didn't  mean  to  ask  that." 

"We  must,"  she  agreed.  "Xot  because  we  want  to  so  much, 
Hugh.  But  we  can't  talk  like  this  and  there  are  things  to 
say.  I  won't  go — I  can't  possibly  go — until  I've  seen  you. 


370  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

I  won't  go  at  all  if — if  I  think  you  need  me  here.  No,  not— ^ 
that  way.  That's  not  what  I  mean.  Need  me  for  a  special 
thing.  If  it's  a  question  of — fighting  instead  of  running 
away.  Oh,  Hugh — you  don't  understand,  do  you?" 

All  he  understood,  it  appeared,  was  that  there  was  some 
new  emergency  that  he  knew  nothing  about.  "We  can't  talk 
like  this/'  he  said  crisply.  "I'll  come  straight  over." 

"No,  it's  not  like  that,  either,"  she  said.  "It's  not  me. 
I'm  all  right.  It's  you.  Hugh,  don't  come  to-night.  Go  and 
see  Gregory,  instead.  See  him  before  you  go — home.  And 
if  you  don't  find  him,  go  to  Constance." 

He  agreed  to  this,  but  made  it  a  matter  of  sheer  docility. 
"I  want  to  see  Greg,  anyway,  but  I  shouldn't  have  thought  of 
tackling  him  to-night.  I  had  a  notion  of  getting  about  a  week's 
sleep,  first." 

There  was  a  vibrant  silence  then,  two  or  three  breaths  long. 

"I  want  a  promise  from  you/'  she  said  at  last,  in  a  tone 
of  deep  seriousness.  "Hugh,  I  want  you  to  promise  that — 
that  you  will  come  to  me.  When  you're  ready.  To-morrow 
or  whenever  it  is." 

"You  want  me  to  promise!"  he  echoed  incredulously. 
"Promise  to  come  to  you!" 

"Yes,"  she  insisted.    "Whatever  happens." 

It  was  in  a  tone  of  troubled  wonder  that  the  words  she 
wanted  came  at  last.  "Yes,  I  promise." 

That  satisfied  her,  and  with  a  little  gasp  she  said,  "Good- 
by." 

There  was  one  blessing  in  store  for  Jean  that  she  had  not 
counted  upon;  one  sacrifice  which  she  had  resolutely  braced 
herself  to  make,  that  was  not  demanded  of  her.  The  one 
almost  unendurable  aspect  of  the  situation  that  had  resulted 
from  her  discovery,  there  on  the  beach  that  Saturday  morn 
ing,  had  been  the  necessity  for  keeping  her  mother  in  the 
dark  about  it. 

They  were  companions — confidantes,  that  pair,  as  mother 
and  daughter  seldom  are.  It  was  something  much  solider 
than  a  mere  intuitive  understanding  (that  is  a  sword  which 
puts  two  ways)  that  this  relation  was  built  upon.  It  some- 


THE   WHITE   ARC  371 

times  iliook  a  good  deal  of  explaining,  indeed,  to  get  a  situa 
tion  fairly  understood  between  them.  But  the  point  was  that 
the  explanation  was  always  possible.  They  could  have  kept 
secrets  from  each  other  if  they  had  wanted  to.  Indeed,  I 
think  it  is  the  inability  to  do  this,  that  often  reduces  two  inti 
mately  associated,  and  it  may  be  warmly  affectionate,  com 
panions,  to  bare  nerves  and  almost  unendurable  exasperations. 

The  bond  between  Jean  and  her  mother  was  a  profound — 
and  quite  unconscious — respect,  in  each,  for  the  integrity  of 
the  other's  life;  of  the  other's  right  to  a  separate,  individual 
entity.  I  don't  know  that  a  respect  like  that — reticence  it 
almost  amounted  to — is  accountable,  but  I'll  venture  to  guess 
that  in  this  case  it  was  partly  accounted  for  by  the  com 
pleteness  of  Ethel's  love  for  her  husband — by  the  extent  to 
which  he  satisfied  and  absorbed  her.  The  child,  much  as  she 
had  been  loved,  had  never  taken  his  place. 

And  then,  being  the  grave,  responsible  little  thing  that  she 
was,  it  had  been  possible  to  treat  her  as  an  adult,  in  matters 
of  responsibility,  before  she  could  even  talk  straight.  Jean 
had  been  enlisted  as  an  ally  of  her  mother's  long  before  she 
could  remember,  in  the  business  of  helping  make  her  father's 
arduous  life  run  smoothly  where  it  could.  As  a  child  of 
ten  she  had  had  problems  brought  for  her  help  in  the  solution 
of  that  many  a  daughter  grows  to  womanhood  without  having 
ever  been  asked  to  consider. 

Confidences,  then,  between  the  pair,  never  having  been 
forced  nor  pried  into,  were  as  natural  a  function  as  eating 
or  breathing.  And  it  is  the  simple  truth  that  that  strange 
elation  of  Jean's,  about  which  she  had  so  wonderingly  com 
mented  to  Hugh  in  the  moment  of  their  parting,  did  not 
leave  her  until  the  realization  came  that  here  was  something 
she  could  not  tell  her  mother. 

Ethel's  condition  was  far  from  satisfactory.  For  a  while 
after  their  arrival  in  Chicago  in  the  autumn,  it  had  steadily 
improved.  But  this  improvement  reached  its  peak  around 
the  Christmas  holidays,  when  her  husband  came  north  on  a 
twenty-days'  furlough.  Since  Ms  return  to  the  border,  it 
had  steadily  grown  worse.  The  doctor  who  was  looking  after 


372  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

her  had  taken  the  orthodox  line — and  stuck  to  it:  rest  and 
quiet,  an  exact  regimentation  of  her  days,  and  above  all,  no 
excitement — no  shocks.  And,  of  course,  the  less  she  improved 
under  this  treatment,  the  more  rigorous  the  treatment  had 
to  be. 

Anyhow,  it  was  transparently  clear  to  Jean,  when,  she  came 
home  that  Sunday  from  Lake  Forest,  that  Ethel  was  in  no 
condition  to  be  told  that  her  daughter  had  embarked  upon  a 
mutually  avowed  love  affair  with  a  married  man.  The  only 
hope  the  girl  could  see — and  it  was  a  passionate  one — was 
that  which  she  had  expressed  to  Constance.  (There  was  not  a 
trace  of  bitterness  in  the  girl's  prevision  that  Ethel,  reunited 
to  her  husband — "with  him  to  hold  on  to,"  would  take  her 
daughter's  affair  less  seriously.)  There  was  nothing  to  do 
but  wait  for  that. 

But  accident  intervened.  As  Jean  hung  up  the  telephone, 
after  her  talk  with  Hugh,  she  heard  her  name  spoken  quietly, 
and  from  near  by,  in  her  mother's  voice.  It  came  from  the 
next  room  and  the  communicating  door  was  open.  She 
switched  on  the  light  and  went  in. 

"Here  I  am,"  her  mother  said.  She  was  stretched  out  in  a 
long  chair.  "I  didn't  mean  to  be  an  eavesdropper,"  she  went 
on.  "I  must  have  been  asleep  when  you  came  in,  and  wakened 
rather  slowly.  I  just  enjoyed  the  sound  of  your  voice  for  a 
while,  before  I  realized  what  it  meant.  And  when  I  did,  it 
was  too  late  to  interrupt." 

"I  didn't  think,"  Jean  said.  "I  didn't  remember  even  you. 
I  heard  Mills  telling  him  I  wasn't  at  home,  and  I  forgot 
everything  else."  Then,  dropping  down  beside  her,  she  took 
both  her  mother's  arms  in  a  strong  grip.  "It's  all  right, 
mother,"  she  said.  "There's  nothing — not  one  thing  in  the 
world  for  you  to  worry  about.  No  harm  has  been  done  to 
an}^body,  and  none  is  going  to  be.  And  I'm  not  unhappy. 
I've  never  been — really — happy  before.  Can't  you  just  believe 
that  ? —  Let  it  go  at  that  ? —  Put  it  out  of  your  mind  and  not 
be  excited  or  distressed  about  it?" 

"Oh,  my  lamb !"  her  mother  said.  "You  haven't  done  me 
any  harm.  Take  off  your  things  so  I  can  feel  you,  and  light 


THE   WHITE   ARC  373 

that  reading  lamp  so  that  I  can  see  you  a  little,  and  then  come 
back  and  tell  me  all  about  it." 

Jean  obeyed  the  first  of  these  instructions  quite  simply, 
like  a  little  girl.  But  when  she  came  back  and  seated  herself 
once  more  upon  the  long  chair  beside  her  mother's  knees, 
she  was  all  of  a  tremble  and  voiceless,  and  she  put  her  head 
down  upon  her  mother's  breast  and  cried  a  while  instead. 

Eventually,  and  in  fragments,  the  story  got  itself  told — the 
story  you  already  know.  And  after  it  was  told  they  talked 
about  it  for  a  while. 

"People  don't  take  things  the  way  they're  supposed  to,  do 
they?"  Jean  said  thoughtfully.  "Hugh  and  I  didn't;  and 
now  you  don't.  I've  done  something  that's  supposed  to  be 
terribly  wicked  and  dangerous  and  you  aren't  angry  or  shocked 
at  all." 

Then,  "Mother,  that  isn't  because  you  don't  believe  it? 
You  don't  think,  because  I  could  go  on  so  long  without  under 
standing,  that  it's  just  a  little  girl  thing  and  that  I  don't 
really  understand  even  now  ?  I  wasn't  jealous,  you  see.  That 
was  what  I  went  by.  I  liked  Helena  because  I  thought  he 
was  fond  of  her.  Because  I  thought  she  made  him  happy. 
I  thought  she  was  what  he  wanted.  But  when  I  found  he 
wanted  me  ... 

"Mother,  if  it's  wrong  to  love  him,  then  there's  nothing  I 
could  do  that  would  make  me  any  wickeder,  in  my  heart,  than 
I  am  now.  I'm  ready  to  do  anything  he  wants  me  to  do. 
Anything — that  will  make  him  happy.  What  becomes  of  me 
doesn't  matter.  It's  like  what  the  preacher  said — 'Rejoicing 
to  be  damned  for  the  glory  of  God/  That's  what  I  mean. 
You  must  believe  it,  mother." 

Her  mother  quieted  the  girl's  vehemence  just  with  the 
pressure  of  her  hands.  Before  she  spoke,  she  smiled.  "You 
come  by  it  honestly,  Jean  dearest.  Had  you  forgotten — or 
didn't  you  ever  know — that  you  wouldn't  have  to  explain  that 
— to  me?  Why,  lamb,  I  was  just  your  age — almost  to  the 
week — when  I  defied  my  mother — told  her  I  didn't  care 
whether  she  disowned  me  or  not — whether  I  ever  saw  her  again 
or  not,  or  any  of  her  family  or  friends, — and  ran  off  with 


374  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

Roger.  We  did  it  on  what  he  had  left  of  a  month's  salary, 
around  eighty  dollars  it  was,  and  the  first  thing  we  bought  out 
of  it  was  a  complete  outfit  of  clothes  for  me  so  that  I  could 
send  everything  I'd  worn  away  from  home  back  to  mother 
in  an  express  package.  Neither  of  us  was  married  to  any 
one  else,  of  course,  but  Fm  not  sure  that  that  would  have  mat 
tered  much,  granted  that  we'd  had  a  chance  to  fall  in  love 
honestly  and  in  good  faith,  first.  I'd  never  had  a  father  long 
enough  to  count.  I'd  been  badly  spoiled — indulged — brought 
up  soft.  But  I'd  have  followed  Roger  barefoot  and  in  rags, 
and  gloried  in  it." 

"I've  known  all  that,  of  course,  always,"  Jean  said  in  a 
voice  of  wonder.  "Only  I  never  tried  to  think  what  it  meant. 
I  couldn't  have  understood  it,  I  suppose,  till  now."  She  put 
her  head  down  again  on  her  mother's  shoulder  and  clutched 
her  in  a  tight  embrace.  "Then  all  you  have  to  do  is  to 
remember,  and  you'll  understand,  too.  Kemember  hard, 
mother I" 

Ethel  winced  at  that,  but  she  resisted  the  girl's  attempt  to 
sit  up  and  inquire  into  the  cause.  "No,  lie  still.  It's  all 
right.  Only — 'remember/  Jean !  How  old  do  you  suppose 
you'll  be  at  forty-two?  Beyond  love  and  the  hunger  for  it? 
It  looks  different  to  you  now,  but  looking  back,  from  then, 
it  won't." 

It  was  getting  close  on  the  dinner  hour  and  old  Mrs.  Craw 
ford  made  a  great  point  of  punctuality,  but  they  stole  as  many 
minutes  as  they  dared  just  to  sit  there  close — closer  than  ever 
they  had  been  before — in  the  dusky  silence.  At  the  end  of 
it  Ethel  gave  Jean  the  one  word  of  counsel  she  had  to  offer. 

"Remember  that  when  two  people  love  each  other — com 
pletely,  it  isn't  possible  for  either  one  to  make  a  sacrifice  for 
the  other.  You're  willing  to  do  anything  to  make  him  happy, 
willing  to  be  ostracized,  disgraced,  damned — for  him.  I  know. 
But  his  happiness  can't  be  had  at  that  price.  No  more  than 
yours  could  be,  by  letting  his  life  be  spoiled  and  broken.  Any 
sacrifice  you  make,  will  be  the  sacrifice  of  both  of  you.  No 
one  told  that  to  Roger  and  me.  It  was  life  that  pointed  it  out 
to  us  as  we  went  along." 


CHAPTER  XXIX 

EILEEN  was  in  what  her  mother-in-law  would  have 
called  a  twitter  over  Gregory's  return. 
But  this  isn't  fair.     Quoting  Mrs.  Corbett  for  de 
scriptions  of  Eileen  is  a  temptation  to  which,  I  am  afraid,  I 
have  yielded  too  often  for  justice.     Gregory's  widow  (she'd 
been  the  widow  par  excellence  in  the  family  idiom  for  so  many 
years,  that  the  appellation  stuck  for  a  year  or  two  after  she'd 
married  him)  was  not  a  sentimental  little  fool,  and  no  one — 
not  even  old  Mrs.  Corbett  herself — really  considered  her  such. 

What  led  the  family  to  take  her — as  they  did — rather  less 
seriously  than  she  deserved,  was,  in  the  first  place,  her  looks. 
She  was  a  pretty  little  thing  (little  according  to  their  scale. 
She  looked  tiny  alongside  Greg)  with  a  soft  little  mouth,  a 
small  sensitive  nose  and  very  delicately  arched  eyebrows.  Add 
to  that  a  pink-and-white  skin,  and  hair  of  so  very  light  a 
brown  that  it  could  still  be  described  as  golden,  and  you  have 
established  a  strong  presumption  against  her  fitness  for  the 
business  of  a  work-a-day  world.  It  was  not  her  fault  that 
she  looked  from  five  to  ten  years  younger  than  her  age.  (She 
was  twenty-eight  when  she  finally  made  up  her  mind  to  marry 
Gregory. )  This  was  not  an  effect  that  she  tried  for  at  all  and 
she  sometimes  regarded  it  as  an  out-and-out  misfortune. 

She  was,  it  can  not  be  denied,  given  to  being  a  bit  soulful 
and  helpless.  This  was  merely  acquiescence  in  an  attitude 
that  people  had  been  taking  toward  her  ever  since  she  was 
five  years  old — not  much  more  her  fault  than  the  shape  of 
her  nose — but  it  explains  the  attitude  of  the  family.  The 
Corbett  women  were  neither  soulful  nor  helpless.  Even  Anne, 
eilly  as  she  was  in  many  ways,  knew  how  to  operate  a  bank- 
account  and  read  a  time  table. 

Greg's  attitude  toward  his  wife  is,  naturally,  to  be  distin- 

375 


376  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

guished  from  that  of  the  rest  of  the  family.  He'd  adored 
her  blindly  for  many  years,  helplessness  and  all.  He  had 
spent  uncounted  hours  doing  her  services  that  neither  of  his 
sisters  would  have  dreamed  of  asking  even  of  the  most  in 
fatuated  lover.  Marriage  produced  a  change — not  disillusion 
ment,  but  acceptance  of  a  new  duty.  He  went  right  on  adoring 
her.  That  dreamy  look  in  her  eyes  continued  to  be — in  his — 
the  most  heavenly  thing  that  could  exist  on  earth.  He  loved 
her  way  of  seeing  pictures  in  the  coals  and  in  the  clouds ;  her 
fancies;  her  glints  of  poetry.  It  is  literally  true  that  he 
thought  of  her  as  a  sojourner  from  a  better  world.  And,  in 
carnating  for  him  an  ideal  like  that,  she  did  redeem  him  from 
the  mere  dull  materiality  that  he  might  have  sunk  into  other 
wise.  Jean  was  quite  right.  He  was — "nicer" — more  human, 
for  having  married  her. 

But  he  came  to  see  her  helplessness  in  a  new  light.  It  was 
not  that  it  irritated  him — not  that  he  begrudged  the  expendi 
ture  of  his  own  time  upon  trifles,  that  it  demanded.  It  was 
a  sheer  sense  of  duty  that  drove  him  to  educating  Eileen  into* 
a  competent  grasp  of  practical  matters.  She  was  none  the  less 
an  angel  now  that  she  was  his  wife.  But  she  was  his  wife 
as  well — wife  of  the  prospective  head  of  the  Corbett  clan, 
prospective  mother  of  the  Corbett  heirs.  In  the  event — un 
likely  enough,  to  be  sure — of  his  own  untimely  death,  she 
would  be  under  a  heavy  responsibility. 

So,  though  it  seemed  to  him  a  little  like  breaking  a  butter 
fly  upon  the  wheel,  he  went  to  work,  with  a  patience  which 
his  office  associates  wouldn't  have  credited  him  with,  teaching 
Eileen  to  do  things  for  herself. 

He  taught  her  to  keep  her  household  accounts  so  that  they 
balanced,  to  put  through  long  distance  calls  on  the  telephone, 
to  wind  her  watch  every  night  and  see  that  it  told  the  right 
time — as  a  preliminary  to  the  art  of  punctuality.  He  en 
trusted  her  with  things  to  put  away  in  his  safety  deposit  box 
at  the  bank,  and  made  her  clip  her  own  bonds  and  deposit  her 
own  dividends,  and  the  picture  that  these  rumored  activities 
made  in  the  collective  mind  of  the  family,  was  that  of  David 
Copperfield  and  Dora.  This  was  a  gross  injustice,  of  course, 


THE    WHITE    ARC  377 

of  which  Eileen  was  well  aware.  She  might  well  have  re 
sented  it  if  she  hadn't  been  the  sweetest  tempered  little  thing 
in  the  world.  She'd  really  taken  her  job  quite  seriously  and 
was  learning  it  as  fast  as  could  have  been  expected.  What 
was  aroused  was  her  pride.  When  Greg  gave  her  an  errand 
to  do,  she  made  a  tremendous  point  of  doing  it,  without  bun 
gling  and  without  delay. 

She  had  no  idea  how  important  the  matter  was  that  Gregory 
delegated  to  her  upon  his  unforeseen  departure  for  New  York, 
Sunday  morning.  He  had  asked  her  to  take  a  certain  paper 
to  Hugh,  secure  his  signature  to  it,  and  mail  it,  registered 
and  by  special  delivery,  to  an  address  that  he  gave  her  in 
New  York.  The  fact  that  Gregory  wanted  it  done,  and  that 
it  was  a  matter  of  business,  gave  it,  so  far  as  she  was  con 
cerned,  a  paramount  importance.  It  never  occurred  to  her 
to  leave  off  trying  when  her  first  attempt  to  find  Hugh,  on 
Sunday,  was  baffled,  nor  did  she  think  of  telegraphing  to  Greg 
and  asking  for  further  instructions.  She  simply  kept  on 
trying  to  get  that  signature,  day  after  day,  at  the  house  and 
at  the  laboratory.  And  though  it  is  true,  as  I  have  said,  that 
she  was  horrified  at  the  discovery  of  Helena's  misconduct, 
the  thing  that  was  still  in  the  foreground  of  her  mind,  as  she 
sat  at  home  late  Friday  afternoon,  awaiting  her  husband's  re 
turn,  was  the  fact  that  she  had  failed  to  get  that  signature. 
She  was,  absurdly,  more  indignant  with  Hugh  for  being  inac 
cessible  when  there  was  something  Gregory  wanted  of  him, 
than  over  his  failure  to  look  after  his  wife. 

Was  Gregory  coining  home  just  because  she  had  failed? 
Had  the  trip  to  New  York  been  in  vain?  For  the  want  of 
that  signature  was  a  fortune  to  be  lost,  as  a  battle  was  once, 
in  the  school  reader,  for  the  want  of  a  horseshoe  nail  ? 

He  was  very  glad  to  see  her.  That  was  plain  enough. 
There  was  no  lack  of  ardor  about  his  embrace.  Perhaps  he 
didn't  know  that  the  paper  hadn't  been  sent — supposed  all 
the  while  that  it  was  safe  at  its  destination!  She  hadn't 
thought  of  that. 

But  no.  He  was  worried  about  something,  she  could  see; 
was  preoccupied,  anyhow — had  something  on  his  mind.  She. 


378  AN"   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

braced  herself  and  made  her  confession.     "I  didn't  get  that 
paper  signed,  Gregory.    I  couldn't  find  Hugh." 

All  he  said  at  first  was,  and  without  full  attention,  "Oh, 
that  doesn't  matter."  Then,  waking  up  a  little,  "You  couldn't 
find  Hugh!  What  do  you  mean?  Where  is  he?" 

"I  don't  know,"  she  said.    "Xobody  seems  to  know." 

"Oh,  he  must  be  somewhere.    Did  you  try  the  laboratory  V* 

"I  should  think  I  did.  I've  been  out  there  every  day.  It's 
locked.  It's  always  locked." 

"How  about  the  phone  ?    Don't  they  answer  ?" 

"Sometimes  not.  When  they  do,  they  just  say  he  isn't 
there." 

"Did  you  tell  them  who  you  were  ?"  he  asked. 

The  thing  that  was  wearing  through  Eileen's  nerves  was 
the  fact  that  he  seemed  to  be  taking  her  failure  so  little  seri 
ously.  She  assured  him,  subduing  her  excitement  as  well  as 
she  could,  that  she  had  told  them  who  she  was  and  had  made 
it  clear  to  them  that  her  errand  was  of  first  importance. 

"Oh,  well,  don't  you  worry,"  he  said  soothingly.  "It's  not 
a  matter  of  much  importance,  anyway.  But  I  imagine  they'll 
tell  me  where  he  is.  I've  really  got  to  see  him.  To-night, 
if  possible." 

He  said  it  soothingly,  but  that  was  not  the  effect  it  pro 
duced.  Her  eyes  filled  up  with  tears,  as  she  said  raggedly : 

"It  wasn't  important  ?  And  I've  been  having  this  perfectly 
horrible — detestable  time  with  Helena  .  .  ."  She  broke 
off  there,  a  shudder  and  a  sob  all  mixed  together. 

Greg  took  her  in  his  arms,  called  her  pet  names,  tried  to 
comfort  her,  apologized  for  having  given  her  an  exaggerated 
idea  of  the  importance  of  the  business,  all  without  success. 
And  it  gradually  came  over  him  that  there  was  something  in 
the  situation  that  he  didn't  know  about. 

"What  about  Helena?"  he  asked.  "You  don't  mean  she's 
been  rude  to  you?" 

"Rude !"  said  Eileen  with  another  shudder.  "Oh,  Greg,  it's 
horrible  !  It's  unbelievable.  Would  be,  if  I  hadn't  s-seen  it !" 

"Tell  me  about  it,"  he  said  quietly,  and  just  his  manner 
of  giving  the  command  steadied  her  so  that  she  could. 


THE   WHITE    ARC  379 

"I  went  there  Sunday  morning,  after  I  couldn't  get  into 
the  laboratory.  I  asked  the  maid  for  Hugh  and  she  said  he 
wasn't  at  home.  And  then  I  asked  for  Helena.  She  said  she'd 
find  her,  and  was  gone  quite  a  long  time.  She'd  asked  me 
to  sit  down  in  the  drawing-room,  but  I  hadn't,  because  I  only 
meant  to  stay  a  minute. 

" — Greg,  you  know  that  mirror  up  on  the  landing  of  the 
stairs  in  their  house,  built  into  the  wall  on  the  bias?  Well, 
I  heard  her  coming  at  last  and  looked  up.  I  looked  up  when 
I  heard  her  stop.  There  was  a  man  with  her.  And  before  I 
could  look  away,  he'd  kissed  her.  It  was  very  quick  and  fur 
tive  and — nasty.  He  took  her  by  the  neck  with  one  hand. 
Hard  .  .  .  And  when  he'd  done  it,  he  tiptoed  away.  I 
heard  him.  And  she  came  down-stairs,  looking — oh,  wicked ! 
There  was  a  smell  of  cigar  smoke  in  her  clothes  and  in  her 
hair.  It  almost  made  me  sick.  She  said  she  didn't  know 
anything  about  Hugh,  except  that  he  wasn't  at  home.  She 
supposed  he  was  at  the  laboratory.  I'd  better  try  there  if  I 
wanted  him. 

"And  she  asked  me  if  I  wouldn't  come  in  and  sit  down. 
She  didn't  say  anything  about  the  man  being  there.  But,  of 
course,  I  didn't.  I  wanted  to  get  out  into  the  air  again. 

"Greg,  he's  been  there  ever  since.  At  least  I  think  he  has. 
I've  been  back  at  the  house  twice.  I  thought  I  had  to  go,  if 
there  was  any  chance  of  finding  Hugh.  Once  I  saw  him,  and 
once  I  only  smelled  his  cigar  again.  He'd  just  gone  stealing 
out  of  the  room  before  I  came  in.  And  Hugh  hasn't  been 
home  at  all!  At  least  Helena  says  he  hasn't.  That  was 
Sunday,  and  this  is  Friday." 

She  heard  Greg  say,  "By  God !"  and  read  some  unguessed 
intention  in  his  dark  face. 

"What  are  you  going  to  do  ?"  she  cried. 

His  manner  instantly  became  cool  again.  "I'm  going  out 
for  a  little  while,"  he  said.  "Don't  you  worry  about  it,  dearest. 
Forget  it,  if  you  can.  Don't  think  of  it  again." 

She  asked  him,  timidly,  if  he  wouldn't  surely  be  back  for 
dinner. 

"I  don't  know,"  he  said.    "Don't  wait  for  me." 


CSO  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

She  had  to  stop  to  dry  her  eyes  and  powder  her  nose,  before 
she  could  follow  him  down-stairs  (she  didn't  want  any  casual 
servant  she  might  meet,  to  see  that  she'd  been  crying,  in  the 
hour  of  her  husband's  return),  and  he  was  just  going  out 
the  door  in  his  big  ulster  and  with  his  big  thick  walking 
stick  hooked  over  his  arm,  when  she  caught  her  last  glimpse 
of  him. 

A  quarter  of  an  hour  later  he  rang  his  brother's  door-bell 
and  was  promptly  admitted  by  one  of  the  maids.  It  happened 
he  knew  her.  She'd  worked  for  his  mother  once.  So  the 
first  exchange  of  words  between  them  was  his  "Good  evening, 
Martha,"  and  her  "Good  evening,  Mr.  Corbett."  And  then, 
"Mrs.  Corbett  at  home  ?"  he  asked. 

The  maid  said  she  thought  Mrs.  Corbett  would  be  coming 
down  for  dinner  in  a  few  minutes,  and  volunteered  to  find  her. 

"No  hurry,"  said  Greg.  She  hesitated,  and  with  a  gesture 
offered  to  help  him  out  of  his  coat.  But  he  said,  "No,  I'm 
not  going  to  stay,"  and  strode  across  just  as  he  was,  into  the 
drawing-room. 

It  all  happened  very  quickly — quicker  than  it  can  be  told, 
almost.  Certainly  before  the  man,  who  had  been  lounging 
very  much  at  ease  in  a  big  leather  easy  chair  before  the  fire, 
could  get  himself  together  to  meet  the  emergency;  almost 
before  he  could  get  to  his  feet,  for  he  had  sat  quite  still  for  a 
paralyzed  moment  after  he  had  heard  the  maid  say  "Mr. 
Corbett,"  trying  to  decide  what  line  to  take.  And  anyhow, 
the  apparition  of  Gregory — six  feet  and  nearly  three  inches 
tall — huge  and  formidable  enough  even  without  that  great 
ulster,  and  the  heavy  walking  stick  that  was  in  his  hand,  was 
enough  to  account  for  a  blink  and  a  gasp.  He  hadn't  visual 
ized  any  such  man  as  that,  nor  reckoned  upon  him.  He  had 
to  swallow  before  he  spoke.  Then : 

"Mr.  Corbett  ?"  he  said.  "My  name's  Gilraln.  Frank  Gil- 
rain.  I'm  an  old  friend  of  your  wife's.  Go  back  to  the  San 
Francisco  days.  You've  heard  her  speak  of  me,  I  guess.  She 
says  she- — told  you  I  was  going  to  be  here  for  a  while." 

"I'm  not  Mrs.  Corbett's  husband,"  Gregory  said.  "I'm  her 
husband's  brother." 


THE    WHITE    ARC  381 

There  was  an  electrical  intensity  in  the  silence  that  fol 
lowed  this  statement.  Gregory,  standing  very  still  and  look 
ing  steadily  at  the  other  man,  was  thoughtfully  weighing, 
among  other  alternatives,  the  wisdom  of  dragging  Helena's 
guest  out  to  the  front  door  and  kicking  him  down  the  rather 
long  flight  of  stone  steps.  And  the  guest,  as  was  apparent 
from  the  way  he  clenched  his  hands  and  moistened  his  lips 
with  the  tip  of  his  tongue,  had  a  clairvoyant  perception  that 
this  project  was  being  considered.  There  wasn't  the  smallest 
question  in  his  mind,  any  more  than  there  was  in  Gregory's, 
that  Gregory  could  do  it  if  he  chose. 

But,  into  the  silence  came  the  sound  of  Helena's  step  on 
the  stair  and  Gregory,  with  no  preliminary  motions  at  all, 
strode  out  into  the  hall  to  meet  her.  Gilrain,  hesitating 
whether  to  follow  or  not,  dropped  back  rather  limp,  into  the 
big  chair  again. 

Gregory  said,  with  only  a  nod  of  greeting,  "I  understand 
Hugh  isn't  home.  Can  you  tell  me  where  to  find  him  ?" 

Even  to  Helena,  his  sudden  emergence  through  the  drawing- 
room  door,  was  formidable.  Was  Gilrain  in  there?  Had 
Gregory  seen  him?  She  didn't  know.  It  wasn't  as  easy  to 
treat  him  with  insolently  smiling  defiance,  as  it  had  been  so  to 
treat  that  slip  of  a  wife  of  his. 

"Why,"  she  said,  "I  don't  know  whether  he's  coming  in  to 
dinner  or  not.  He  hasn't  been  home  much  lately.  He's 
likely  to  be  at  the  laboratory,  I  suppose."  Then  she  came  the 
rest  of  the  way  down-stairs  and,  in  the  interval,  got  herself 
a  little  better  in  hand. 

"We're  just  sitting  down  to  dinner,"  she  said.  "He  may 
come.  Won't  you  stay?" 

"I  think  not,"  he  said.    "But,  if  I  may,  I'll  telephone." 

The  instrument  was  at  the  end  of  the  hall  and  he  went 
back  to  it  quickly,  hardly  waiting  for  his  sister-in-law's  curt, 
"Of  course  !"  But  even  as  Helena  said  the  words,  her  eyes  left 
him  and  sought  the  drawing-room  doorway — looking  for  Gil- 
rain,  or  signaling  to  him,  he  couldn't  make  out  which. 

He  called  the  laboratory  number  from  memory  and  got  an 
immediate  connection.  It  was  Hugh  himself  who  answered. 


382  AN   AMEEICAN   FAMILY 

Gregory  said,  after  telling  who  he  was,  "I  want  a  talk  with 
you  to-night.  At  once.  It's  a  matter  of  great  importance/' 

"I've  just  this  minute  been  calling  your  house,"  said  Hugh, 
"to  tell  you  the  same  thing.  But  Eileen  said  she  thought  you 
were  already  on  the  way  out  here." 

"I  came  to  your  house,  instead.  I'm  there  now."  Gregory 
paused  there;  then,  with  a  significant  edge  to  his  voice,  went 
on,  'T'll  come  out  to  the  laboratory,  or  I'll  wait  here  for  you, 
just  as  you  please." 

"Oh,  come  out  here,"  said  Hugh.  "If  you  haven't  your 
car  with  you  you  can  pick  up  a  taxi  just  round  the  corner." 

Helena  was  still  at  the  foot  of  the  stairs  when  Gregory 
came  back  from  the  telephone,  and  Gilrain  nowhere  in  sight; 
lurking  round  the  corner  in  the  drawing-room  he  must  be. 
Some  sort  of  communication  had  passed,  no  doubt,  between 
them,  while  he  was  at  the  telephone.  The  woman  had  got 
herself  thoroughly  in  hand  again;  color  was  in  her  cheeks 
and  an  insolent  spark  in  her  eyes.  She  looked  wicked,  just 
as  Eileen  had  said. 

"Is  he  coming  home  ?  Or  are  you  going  to  the  laboratory  ?" 
she  asked. 

"I'm  going  to  him.    Good  night." 

She  said  good  night  in  reply,  but  did  not  move  toward 
the  door  with  him.  She  had  not  moved  when  he  closed  it. 

The  laboratory  door  was  locked,  but  a  man  was  waiting, 
down  in  the  machine-shop,  to  let  Gregory  in  and  conduct  him 
to  the  foot  of  the  stairs.  Hugh  sung  out  from  the  head  of 
them,  "Come  up." 

It  was  symptomatic  of  something  unusual  in  the  atmos 
phere  between  them,  that  the  two  brothers  gripped  hands. 
Demonstrations  of  that  sort  weren't  their  rule. 

Hugh's  first  words  were,  "I  hope  you  haven't  had  dinner. 
Because  I  haven't.  I  don't  believe  I've  eaten  a  meal  this 
week.  But  I've  ordered  a  real  one  to-night  for  the  two  of  us. 
There's  a  little  saloon  around  the  corner,  where  they  have  a 
man  that  really  understands  steaks." 

"No,  I  haven't  dined,"  said  Greg.  "I'll  be  glad  of  a 
steak."  Then  he  added,  "You're  looking  first-rate." 


THE    WHITE    ARC  383 

There  was  not,  it  may  be  noted,  the  faintest  doubt  in  Greg 
ory's  mind  that  Hugh  knew  the  essentials  at  least,  of  what 
had  been  going  on  in  his  house  during  the  past  week.  That 
conviction  took  possession  of  his  mind  the  moment  Hugh 
said  over  the  telephone,  that  he  wanted  to  see  him  that 
night,  about  a  matter  of  importance.  His  remark  now,  about 
Hugh's  looks,  meant  a  good  deal  more  than  it  said.  There 
was  a  clear  brightness  in  the  younger  brother's  eyes,  a  ring 
of  confident  authority  in  his  voice,  that  made  it  plain  to 
Gregory  that  he  had  risen  to  the  situation — had  his  plans — 
knew  just  what  he  was  about. 

"You  wouldn't  have  said  that,  half  an  hour  ago,"  said 
Hugh.  "I've  just  had  my  first  shave  since  Saturday  morn 
ing."  Then  he  called  down  the  stairs,  "Come  up  and  set  the 
table,  Fred.  We'll  be  ready  for  dinner  as  soon  as  it  comes 
along."  And  at  the  man's  "All  right,"  Hugh  led  the  way 
into  the  library.  Fred  came  along,  too,  and  with  an  expedi 
tion  evidently  the  result  of  practise,  set  the  table,  producing 
his  materials  from  a  sort  of  kitchenette  that  opened  off  the 
library. 

There  was  something  curiously  attractive  about  the  library. 
There  was  not  an  article  in  it  that  made  any  esthetic  pre 
tensions,  but  the  total  of  it  produced  an  effect  of  homeliness 
and  comfort.  Eileen,  in  her  mystical  way,  might  have  said 
that  this  was  because  a  man  was  happy  here — secure — content. 
Hugh  himself  produced  an  effect  at  variance  with  Gregory's 
habitual  thoughts  about  him;  an  air,  "of  knowing  what  was 
what."  One  who  saw  him  here,  wouldn't  think  of  sighing 
over  him  as  "poor  old  Hugh."  And  he  "did  himself,"  as  the 
English  would  say,  rather  well  out  here,  too.  This  man 
Fred — whatever  his  other  functions  might  be — was  doing  the 
work  of  a  man  servant  very  effectively. 

His  presence  in  the  room  made  it,  of  course,  impossible  to 
talk,  so  Greg's  eyes  lazily  followed  him,  with  the  sense,  just 
faintly  stirring,  of  recognition. 

When  they  heard  a  knock  on  the  street  door  down-stairs — 
the  dinner,  doubtless — and  he  went  to  answer  it,  Hugh 
asked :  "Do  you  remember  him  ?" 


384:  AN"   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

"I've  been  half  thinking  I  ought  to,"  said  Gregory. 

"He's  Jean's  burglar,"  Hugh  reminded  him.  "He  came  out 
and  asked  for  a  job  two  or  three  months  ago;  had  another 
one,  but  thought  he'd  like  to  work  for  me.  I  hadn't  heard 
anything  of  him  in  years,  but  I  was  very  glad  to  get  him,  of 
course.  He's  an  absolutely  first-class  tool-maker  and  machin 
ist,  and  he  can  make  a  shot  at  anything.  He's  the  only  one  of 
us,  except  the  night  watchman,  that  keeps  regular  hours — • 
seven  to  seven." 

"You're  not  afraid  of  him,  then?" 

"I  don't  know  anybody,"  said  Hugh,  "whose  loyalty  I'd 
rate  any  higher." 

It  wus  the  dinner  that  had  knocked,  and  the  two  brothers 
now  settled  down  to  do  justice  to  it — a  big  thick  steak  apiece, 
a  platter  of  fried  potatoes,  a  pie  and  a  pot  of  coffee.  They 
could  eat,  those  big  Corbetts,  and  it  was  their  habit  to  treat 
food  seriously.  Fred  was  dismissed  as  soon  as  they  were  fairly 
settled,  sure  that  tliey  had  everything  they  wanted  within 
reach,  but  except  for  an  occasional  word  of  friendly  idle 
reminiscence,  there  was  no  attempt  to  talk  until  they  had 
finished.  Then  Gregory  lighted  a  cigar,  and  Hugh  loaded 
his  pipe. 

"You've  something  you  want  to  talk  over  with  me,  as  well 
as  I  with  you/'  Hugh  said  after  a  little  silence.  "Tell  me 
your  story  first." 

Gregory  was,  for  a  moment,  profoundly  disconcerted.  It 
was  true  he  had  wanted  to  talk  with  Hugh.  Had  come  home 
from  New  York  intent  upon  that  interview  as  the  first  step  in 
a  course  he  was  determined,  if  possible,  to  follow.  But  it 
was  also  true  that  he  had  forgotten  his  intention  so  com 
pletely,  since  his  talk  with  Eileen,  that  ho  could  hardly,  now, 
bring  it  back  to  his  mind  at  all.  Certainly,  though,  a  discus 
sion  of  Hugh's  wife  and  of  Hugh's  honor  should  be  begun  by 
Hugh  himself  and  upon  his  own  terms. 

So  Gregory  began,  rather  vaguely;  but  presently  he  got 
into  his  stride.  The  thing  really  was  near  his  heart.  Nearer 
than  any  abstraction  except  Corbett  &  Company  had  ever  come 
to  it. 


THE   WHITE    ARC  385 

"I've  been  talking  to  some  men  in  New  York/'  He  said, 
"who  know  the  real  truth  about  what's  going  on  over  there — 
in  France — I  mean,  as  well  as  anybody  does,  and  it  looks 
pretty  black  to  them.  The  French  military  authorities  didn't 
mean  to  defend  Yerdun.  They  thought  it  was  hopeless.  It 
was  the  politicians  who  saw  they  didn't  dare  let  it  go ;  that  the 
whole  French  morale  would  cave  in  if  they  did.  So  it's  a 
desperate  thing.  They're  probably  going  to  lose  it  anyway. 

"And  the  English  haven't  got  up  steam  yet.  They  aren't 
ready  to  start  an  offensive  in  their  sector  that  will  take  the 
pressure  off  the  French.  They  won't  be  ready  till  next  sum 
mer,  and  it  looks  as  if  that  would  be  too  late.  If  the  French 
collapse,  we'll  have  to  go  in,  whether  the  man  in  the  White 
House  wants  to  fight  or  not.  The  Germans  are  simply  playing 
with  us  in  this  submarine  business.  They're  stalling  to  hold 
us  off  until  they've  finished  up  the  French.  Then  they'll  tear 
up  their  promises  about  respecting  neutral  shipping,  and  start 
sinking  everything.  Regardless.  If  we  stand  for  that,  and 
wait  till  they've  starved  out  England,  then  they'll  take  us  on 
by  ourselves.  The  kaiser  has  said  that,  in  so  many  words,  to 
Gerard.  Said  he  wouldn't  stand  any  nonsense  from  us  after 
he  got  his  hands  free. 

"And  where  will  we  be  then?  Hog-fat  with  money,  and 
without  any  defense  at  all.  But  it  won't  come  to  that ! 
We're  going  to  be  in  the  war  ourselves — up  to  the  neck — be 
fore  the  year's  out.  Well,  that's  preliminary.  I  may  be 
wrong  about  it.  My  dope  may  be  wrong.  But  it's  what  I 
believe. 

"Now,  here's  where  we  come  down  to  brass  tacks.  There's 
an  idea  for  a  new  kind  of  tractor  for  a  military  purpose.  As 
a  fighting  thing,  I  mean;  armor  on  it,  guns  in  it.  They'll 
want  an  immense  lot  of  them.  There's  no  question  of  a  con 
tract.  The  thing  hasn't  gone  through  yet.  But  if  it  does, 
they'll  want  'em.  My  God,  how  they'll  want  'em!  And 
they'll  want  'em  quick. 

"Well,  my  proposition  is  that  we  get  ready.  Take  an  abso 
lutely  blind  chance.  It'll  mean  a  hell  of  a  lot  of  money  in 
vested;  new  land,  new  buildings,  new  equipment,  and  that 


386  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

money'll  have  to  come  out  of  our  own  jeans.  And — this  Is 
what  I  want  you  to  understand — not  a  ghost  of  a  guarantee 
that  we'll  ever  get  it  back.  Just  a  blind  chance,  as  I've  said. 
As  a  business  proposition,  it's  indefensible.  If  it  weren't 
that  we  three,  you  and  father  and  I,  own  every  share  of  Cor- 
bett  &  Company,  I  couldn't  consider  it. 

"I  remember  your  having  said  once,  that  you  thought 
grandfathers  trust  involved  something  more  than  his  money. 
That  sounded  wild  to  me  then,  I  admit.  I  didn't  see  it  at 
all.  Well,  I've  changed  since  then.  This  war  has  begun  to — 
get  me.  Especially,  I  suppose,  now  that  the  kid's  over  there. 
The  old  game  of  making  our  annual  statement  every  year 
show  better  than  it  showed  the  year  before  doesn't  seem 
quite  the  only  game  to  play.  There's  a  better  one,  and  I 
want  to  get  into  it.  But  I've  got  to  know,  first,  how  it  strikes 
you/' 

Hugh  had  not  interrupted  once.  Gregory  had  been  talking 
with  averted  gaze,  a  little  self-conscious  and  ashamed  over 
the  betrayal  of  emotion  he  knew  his  voice  was  making.  But 
now,  looking  up,  he  needed  no  words  for  his  answer.  Hugh's 
face  was  alight.  A  brightness  of  tears  was  in  his  eyes.  He 
thrust  a  big  hand  across  the  table,  for  his  brother's.  "You 
didn't  really  doubt  how  it  would  strike  me,  did  you  ?" 

"Oh,  I  didn't  suppose  you'd  care  a  damn  about  the  money," 
Gregory  admitted.  "But  I  wasn't  quite  sure  how  you'd  feel 
about  the  war.  I  thought,  perhaps,  you  didn't  believe  in  war." 

"I've  been  pretty  slow  coming  to  see  it — what  it  was  going 
to  mean  to  us,"  Hugh  said.  "Up  to  four  or  five  months  ago 
— well,  it  horrified  me  and  made  me  blue — but  it  was  some 
thing  I  kept  trying  to  ignore.  But  then — I  was  waked  up. 
And  lately  I've  been  thinking  that  when  I  could  get  free,  over 
here,  the  best  thing  I  could  do  would  be  to  follow  Carter.  I 
think  that's  one  way  of  waking  us  up ;  getting  us  ready.  I'm 
not  quite  clear  about  it.  That's  one  of  the  things  I  thought 
we'd — get  to,  perhaps,  to-night. 

"I've  felt  I  had  a  job  here,  you  see.  But  that's  finished 
now.  I  think  it  is.  I  think  that  this  last  week  has  finished 
it." 


THE    WHITE    ARC  387 

He  hesitated  there,  a  little  awkwardly.  It  wasn't  as  easy 
to  tell  about  Corbettite  to  Gregory  as  it  had  been  to  tell  it  to 
Jean.  The  strong-box  that  had  his  samples  in  it  stood  upon 
his  desk.  He  got  up  and  fetched  it — it  was  heavier  now  than 
it  had  been — and  laid  it  on  the  table  in  front  of  Gregory. 

"Open  it,"  he  said. 

Gregory  lifted  the  hinged  cover.  "What  .  .  . !"  he  began. 
But  literally,  he  could  not  command  another  word.  Coulci 
only  stare,  blankly,  across  at  his  brother. 

He  hadn't  had  the  faintest  doubt  that  the  subject  Hugh 
was  leading  up  to  was  his  disastrous  marriage.  Everything 
Hugh  had  said,  refracted,  as  it  was,  by  that  fixed  idea  of  his, 
bore  that  interpretation.  Even  when  he  left  the  table  and 
fetched  the  strong-box,  there  was  in  Gregory's  mind,  the  wild 
notion  that  it  would  be  found  to  contain  letters,  from  or  to 
Helena,  incriminating  evidence  of  some  sort.  It  wasn't  a  no 
tion  he  had  time  to  develop  or  examine  before  he  lifted  the 
cover  and  saw  the  bits  of  dull  metal  which  the  box  contained. 
The  effect  on  his  mind  was  that  of  a  collision.  For  a  moment 
it  simply  stopped. 

Hugh  had  not  sat  down  again;  had  gone  back  to  the  desk 
and  was  busy  reloading  his  pipe.  "It's  a  phase  of  lead,  that 
stuff  in  there,"  he  said,  "with  a  completely  different  set  of 
characteristics.  It's  as  plastic  as  lead,  but  immensely  harder. 
It's  the  ideal  bearing-metal,  I  think.  The  tests  I've  made  in 
dicate  that.  I've  been  working  at  it  for  two  years — on  the 
track  of  it.  Six  months  ago  I  was  getting  it  half  the  times  I 
tried.  Now  I  can  get  it  every  time.  I  know  how  it's  done. 
It's  only  in  this  past  week  I've  really  made  sure  of  it.  But  I 
am  sure  now." 

Something  automatic  in  Gregory's  mind  turned  up  the  ob 
servation,  "I  suppose  if  you  could  make  it  in  quantities,  and 
cheap.  .  .  How  much  does  it  cost  a  pound  to  produce  it  ?" 

"I  haven't  an  idea,"  said  Hugh,  taken  aback  by  this,  to  him, 
novel  aspect  of  his  discovery.  "I  suppose  that  what  I've  got 
in  that  box  has  cost  me  as  much  as  so  much  gold  would  have." 

Gregory's  mind  was  coming  to  life.  "And  that's  what 
you've  been  doing  this  last  week,  shut  up  in  here  so  that  ao 


3S8  AN    AMETttOAN    FAMILY 

one  could  get  a  word  through  to  you !  Playing  with"  that 
stuff!  Man,  don't  you  know  what's  been  happening  in  your 
own  house !  Don't  you  know  that  your  wife's  got  a  lover.  That 
he's  been  living  there  with  her  all  the  week." 

Hugh's  pipe  dropped  to  the  floor.  Slowly  his  face  went 
white.  He  sat  back  limply  against  the  edge  of  the  desk. 

"Are  you  sure  of  that?"  he  asked.  "Are  you  sure  that's 
true?" 

"Yes,  I'm  sure,"  Gregory  said  more  gently.  "As  sure  as 
it's  ever  possible  to  be  in  such  a  case.  I'm  sorry  I  spoke 
like  that.  I  thought  you  knew.  I  thought  that  was  what 
you  wanted  to  talk  to  me  about.  I've  just  come  from  there, 
you  see.  From  your  house.  I've  seen  him.  He  thought  I 
was  you.  Thought  I  was  the  husband  he'd  dishonored.  And 
he  stood  there  looking  at  me  like  a  rat  in  a  corner,  thinking 
I  meant  to  kill  him,  I  suppose.  I'd  have  done  it  gladly 
enough,  only  .  .  ." 

Hugh  picked  up  his  pipe,  and,  with  shaking  hands,  lighted 
it.  Then  slowly  went  round  to  the  swivel  chair  that  stood 
before  his  desk,  and  sat  down.  After  a  minute  he  struck 
another  match  and  held  it  to  the  bowl  of  his  pipe,  but  did  not 
draw  upon  it.  And  he  did  not  say  a  word. 

Silence  was  not  endurable  and  Gregory  began  to  talk.  He 
told,  in  somewhat  fuller  details  than  I  have  reported,  the 
story  that  Eileen  had  told  him,  his  manner  as  dry  and  matter- 
of-fact  as  he  could  make  it.  All  Hugh  needed,  he  felt,  was 
time  and  the  reaction  of  anger  would  come.  A  glow  of  deter 
mination  in  place  of  this  white  passive  bewilderment. 

But  the  glow  did  not  come. 

"The  man  told  me  he  was  an  old  friend  of  hers,"  Gregory 
observed  presently.  "He  pretended  to  think  that  she  had 
told  me  all  about  him.  Told  you,  that  is.  He  thought  I  was 
you.  He  said  his  name  was  Gilrain."  Then,  "Have  you  ever 
heard  of  him  ?" 

"Xot  his  name,"  said  Hugh.  "But  it's  quite  true  that  she 
did  telephone  to  me,  last  Saturday,  that  she  expected  some  one 
for  a  visit.  She  asked  if  I  was  coming  home  for  dinner.  I 


THE    WHITE    AKC  3SO 

was  just  getting  this  new  set  of  experiments  laid  out,  and  I 
forgot  all  about  it." 

"By  God  !"  said  Gregory  under  his  breath.    Then : 

"Look  here,  Hugh !  You've  got  to  do  something  about  this. 
If  I  can  help,  tell  me  what  you  want  me  to  do.  That's  what  I 
came  out  here  for." 

"I  know/'  said  Hugh  laboriously,  "and  I'm  much  obliged. 
But  you  can't — help.  I've  got  to  think  the  thing  out." 

"Let  me  help  with  that." 

"I  can't.  There's  more  to  it  than  you  know,  or  than  I  could 
explain.  I'm  getting  my  bearings  now.  It's  coming  clear 
what  I  have  to  do.  I'll  be  all  right.  You  go  along  home. 
I'll  get  on  better  by  myself/* 

Gregory  came  over  and  sat  on  the  end  of  the  desk  close  be 
side  him. 

"Hugh,"  he  said,  "you  aren't  playing  with  the  idea  of  let 
ting  her  get  away  with  it,  are  you? — The  rotten  idea  that 
she's  entitled  to  that  if  she  wants  it  ?  That's  well  enough  for 
these  free-love  swine  that  we  read  about.  This  is  your  wife — 
Mrs.  Hugh  Corbett!  That's  the  name  she's  dragging  in  the 
dirt." 

He  paused  there,  waiting.  Then,  in  a  sudden  blaze  of  pas 
sion. 

"Damn  you,  Hugh !  You  had  a  right  to  pick  her  out  of  the 
gutter.  But  you've  no  right,  now  you've  married  her,  to  let 
her  go  back  there." 

Another  silence.    Then : 

"All  right.    I'll  go." 

"You're  all  wrong,"  said  Hugh,  "but  you've  a  way  of  com 
ing  out  right,  at  the  end.  Wait  a  minute  and  I'll  go  along 
with  you,  if  you're  walking." 

"Where?"  Gregory  asked. 

"Home  I"  said  Hugh. 


CHAPTEE  XXX 

THE  table  linen  under  Gilrain's  hands  had  the  cool  sheen 
of  satin.    The  glass  whose  stem  his  thick  fingers  handled 
gingerly  in  the  fear  of  breaking  was  full  of  the  best 
champagne  he  had  ever  tasted.    Wonderful  food  was  before 
him. 

Helena,  across  the  table  there,  was  incomparably  the  most 
beautiful  woman  he  had  ever  seen,  and  more  beautiful  to-night 
than  she  had  looked  to  him  before.  He  had  never  seen  her 
dressed  like  this  before.  To-night  she  come  down  as  if  for 
a  ball  or  a  great  dinner.  Her  sleeveless  gown,  cut  very  low, 
was  of  a  curious  shade  of  blue,  dark  yet  bright,  vivid  yet 
variable.  Even  his  untaught  eyes  discerned  a  harmony  in 
which  it  took  a  part  with  the  jade  earrings  she  wore,  and  the 
jade  pendant  that  hung  in  the  cleft  of  her  bosom,  and  her 
hair,  and  the  dusky  olive  color  of  her  skin,  which  darkened 
into  mysterious  shadows  in  the  candlelight. 

She  was  his,  that  woman.  His  mistress.  Utterly  his,  and 
had  been  ever  since  that  first  night  when  she  had  brought 
him  home  with  her.  One  of  the  easiest  of  his  conquests.  The 
incredible  augury  that  had  been  in  her  smile  after  she  had 
broken  away  from  his  hands  and  struck  him,  that  night  in 
the  little  room  over  the  drug  store — a  week  ago  to-night,  that 
was — had  come  to  pass.  It  seemed  that  she  had  meant  from 
the  very  first  that  it  should.  Her  attitude  now,  as  she  lounged 
over  the  table,  her  bare  arms  stretched  toward  him,  her  clasped 
hands  within  easy  reach  of  his,  her  shoulders  contracted  so 
that  the  silken  line  of  her  gown  sagged  even  more  than  it 
was  meant  to  do,  was  an  insolent  proclamation  of  their  inti 
macy — a  provocation  to  a  renewal  of  it. 

He  had  dreamed  stories  like  that;  but  this  thing  had  hap 
pened  !  To  him !  And  yet  the  only  real  comfort  he  had,  in 

390 


THE    WHITE    ARC  391 

this  moment,  the  only  wholly  pleasurable  sensation,  was  the 
pressure  against  his  thigh  of  that  little  revolver  of  his. 

They  had  sat  down  to  dinner  as  soon  as  Gregory  Corbett 
left  the  house.  She  had  given  him  no  chance  even  to  suggest 
anything  else;  a  mere  direction  to  one  of  her  servants  had 
compelled  him  to  follow  her  out  without  an  audible  protest. 
All  through  the  dinner,  too,  the  servants  had  constantly  been 
about;  hardly  out  of  the  room,  so  that  he'd  had  no  chance 
to  talk  with  her.  It  hadn't  happened  like  that  before.  It 
hadn't  happened  to-night.  She  had  managed  it — without 
appearing  to.  By  some  mysterious  social  resource  that  he 
didn't  understand.  His  hurry  had  effected  nothing.  She 
had  gone  through  the  dinner  with  all  the  lazy  deliberation  of 
complete  security.  And  that  enormous  brother-in-law  of  hers 
had  gone  off,  the  better  part  of  an  hour  ago,  now,  to  tell  her 
husband  what  he  so  plainly  suspected !  What  was  her  game  ? 
What  the  hell  was  her  game ! 

Now,  though,  with  the  dessert  and  the  coffee,  the  servants 
were  finally  dismissed.  Now  they  could  talk. 

"You  didn't  make  much  of  a  dinner,"  she  observed.  "And 
your  last  night,  too ;  when  I  had  tried  so  hard  to  make  it  nice. 
I'm  afraid  Gregory  spoiled  your  appetite."  There  was  mock 
ery  but  no  real  malice  in  her  tone.  A  sort  of  lazy  amusement, 
if  such  an  emotion  were  credible  in  the  circumstances. 

"I've  never  seen  the  man  yet  that  I  was  afraid  of.  I  wasn't 
afraid  of  him.  But  you  were — that  was  plain  enough — when 
you  saw  him  there." 

"It  took  my  breath,  for  a  minute,"  she  admitted.  "I'd  for 
gotten  they  were  so  big." 

"They!" 

"Gregory  and  Hugh.  They're  about  of  a  size.  If  anything, 
Hugh's  the  strongest,  they  say.  Oh,  he  could  wring  your 
neck  as  easily  as  he  could  mine,  if  it  came  to  that." 

It  was  with  an  uncontrollable  jerk  that  he  thrust  back  his 
chair  and  slid  forward  to  the  edge  of  it. 

She  laughed,  outright;  a  hard  laugh  with  the  edge  of  a 
sneer  in  it.  "But  he  won't,"  she  added,  "That's  what  he 
never  does.  He — thinks,  instead." 


392  AN"   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

He  made  an  effort — not  very  successful — to  drop  back  into 
an  easier  attitude,  but  her  strange  eyes  no  longer  mocked  him. 
They  had  darkened  into  a  sober  reverie. 

Here  was  his  chance — the  chance  he  had  awaited  so  im 
patiently — to  talk  with  her.  And  it  was  high  time.  Every 
moment  put  him  in  deeper  jeopardy.  He  knew  what  he 
ought  to  say;  what  he  ought  to  do. 

He  ought  to  ask  her  for  the  money.  His  money.  Bertsch's 
money.  He  ought  to  take  it  and  go,  without  wasting  another 
minute.  And  thank  his  stars  if  he  was  not  too  late.  But  this 
was  not  what  he  wanted  to  do.  He  had  another  idea — a  bigger 
idea.  One  that  would  provide  for  this  adventure  of  his  an 
ending  as  strange  as  its  beginning  had  been.  Was  it  sheer 
rank  madness — or  the  only  sensible  thing  a  man  in  his  posi 
tion  could  do  ?  The  only  way  that  could  be  determined  would 
be  by  putting  it  to  the  proof.  The  moment  for  putting  it  to 
the  proof  was  now. 

Well,  then — but  his  throat  was  dry.  He  swallowed,  and 
reached  out  for  the  glass  of  champagne.  She  spoke,  and  he 
started  at  her  voice ;  pulled  back  his  hand  from  the  glass. 

"I  drew  the  money  this  afternoon,"  she  said. 

"What  money?    I  mean — how  much?" 

She  looked  at  him  curiously.  "Why,  the  three  thousand 
dollars,  of  course.  Thirty-two  hundred,  rather;  to  avoid  the 
even  amount  I'd  put  in.  You  can  have  it,  if  you  like,  that 
extra  two."  She  smiled.  "My  husband's  contribution  to  the 
cause." 

"They  didn't  make  any  trouble  about  it  at  the  bank?"  ho 
asked.  "Didn't  act  as  if  they  suspected  anything?" 

She  frowned.  "Don't  be  a  fool,"  she  admonished  him 
sharply.  "What  should  they  suspect  ?" 

There  it  was!  Another  manifestation  of  that  astounding 
fact ;  a  fact  he  could  not — even  now — quite  bring  his  mind  to 
accept. 

A  clock — somewhere — struck  the  half-hour,  and  his  muscles 
drew  taut  again. 

"Have  you  got  it  here  ?"  he  asked. 

"In  the  house,  yes.    Naturally,  I  haven't  it — on  me."    With 


THE    WHITE    ARC  393 

a  smile  and  a  gesture  she  indicated  the  scantiness  of  her 
corsage.  "There  wouldn't  be  space  for  it,"  she  said;  and 
added,  "It's  up  in  my  room.  We'll  go  and  get  it  presently. 
Or  now,  if  you're  in  a  hurry." 

"You'll  get  it  now.  And  you'll  bring  it  down  here."  He 
tried  hard  to  get  the  confident  ring  of  a  command  into  his 
voice,  but  could  not  feel  that  he  had  succeeded.  And  his 
eyes,  which  had  met  hers  boldly  enough  at  first,  had  to  shift 
away  as  those  black  brows  of  hers  flattened  down. 

"You're  afraid,"  she  said.  "You're  still  afraid.  You're 
afraid  Hugh  will  come  back  and  find  you  here.  Like  a  scene 
in  a  society  play.  Haven't  I  told  you  he  won't  come !  Nor 
do  anything  if  he  does !"  Then  the  note  of  angry  impatience 
left  her  voice,  but  it  took  on  a  darker  intensity  as  she  went  on. 
Her  eyes  found  his  and  held  them. 

"Tell  me  if  it  is  not  true  that  I  have  kept  my  promises, 
so  far.  Every  one  of  them.  And  more.  If  I  have  not — as 
you  say — made  good.  I've  done  all,  haven't  I,  that  you  wanted 
me  to.  More  than  you  dreamed  I  would  or  could.  Everything 
has  been  as  I  said  it  would  be.  Well,  and  now  I  say  you  are 
still  safe  here.  Even  though  my  husband  knows — or  guesses — 
everything.  Unless  you  are  a  coward,  you  will  trust  me  now. 
This  is  our  last  evening  together.  You  are  going  away  and 
never  coining  back.  This  will  be  our  good-by.  Come." 

Without  a  look  at  him  she  rose  and  led  the  way,  and  without 
a  word  he  followed. 

Frank  Gilrain  (this  was  only  one  of  the  many  names  he 
went  by,  but  it  serves  our  purpose  well  enough)  had  been 
living  by  his  wits  for  thirty  years.  He  was  a  roving  adven 
turer;  had  made  as  many  strange  voyages  as  Sinbad;  knew, 
like  the  palm  of  his  hand,  many  strange  corners  of  the  world. 
His  operations  were  never  very  bold  nor  imaginative.  He  was 
a  rascal  of  the  merchant  or  broker  type — a  go-between — a 
tipster — a  hanger-on  in  the  fringes  of  things;  a  snatcher  of 
minor  strategic  advantages.  The  rewards  he  got  were  what 
would  have  been  called  commissions,  had  the  enterprises  he 
was  engaged  in  been  reputable.  All  were  fish  that  came  to 
his  net.  He  had  held  a  few  minor  political  jobs — one  of  these 


394  AN"   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

in  the  superintendent's  office  of  the  prison  where  Anton 
Galicz  had  served  out  his  sentence.  And  his  graft  here  had 
been  the  extortion  of  money  from  the  families  and  friends  of 
prisoners,  on  the  strength  of  his  pretended  ability  to  secure 
concessions  and  privileges  for  them,  and  even  a  reduction  of 
their  terms.  He  had  had  a  job  in  one  of  the  bureaus  of  the 
Philippine  government,  and  had  done  a  little  business  in  the 
way  of  selling  concessions,  which  he  could  not  deliver,  to 
dupes  who  would  be  afraid  to  complain.  He  had  knocked 
about  in  the  Central  American  countries — a  filibuster  in  a 
small  way — a  dealer  in  revolutions. 

He  had  undeniable  gifts;  an  extraordinary  memory  for 
persons,  and  a  very  quick  perception  of  the  possibilities  latent 
in  the  positions  they  occupied,  the  strategic  advantages  that 
might  be  derived  from  them.  He  had  a  remarkable  capacity 
for  digesting  gossip,  trade  talk,  technical  terms  of  all  sorts. 
Give  him  a  week's  visit  on  a  coffee  plantation,  and  he  could 
pass  himself  off  as  a  coffee  planter;  a  sea-voyage  with  a  mining 
engineer,  and  three  years  later,  if  it  served  his  need,  he  could 
talk  like  one.  An  amorous  adventure  of  his  had  once  taken 
him  into  an  anarchist  free-love  colony,  and  the  catch  phrases 
of  radicalism — the  idiom  of  it,  had  been  like  his  mother- 
tongue — one  of  his  numerous  mother-tongues — ever  since. 
Whatever  he  pretended  to  be,  he  could  always  create  the  im 
pression  of  being  an  insider;  of  possessing  sources  of  confiden 
tial  information.  Indeed,  he  managed  to  believe,  somehow, 
that  he  was  an  insider ;  that  he  really  did  know. 

His  courage  was  good  enough — it  had  never  really  failed 
him — and  he  believed  it  impregnable.  He  had,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  a  very  high  appreciation  of  his  own  gifts.  And,  in 
the  light  of  them,  had  often  wondered  why  the  big  thing  he 
was  always  looking  for,  never  came  his  way. 

It  never  did.  A  few  hundred  dollars  always  seemed  to  be 
his  limit.  The  thousand  he  was  to  have  from  Bertsch  for 
this  job,  would  be  a  high-water  mark  for  him.  He  was  always 
broke,  that  was  the  trouble;  always  in  a  position  where  he 
would  have  to  take  whatever  the  bigger  men  were  willing  to 

W- 


THE   WHITE   ARC  395 

His  experience  of  the  past  week  had  disconcerted  him  pro 
foundly — stripped  him  of  his  old  assurance.  Nothing  that 
had  happened  to  him,  since  the  night  Helena  had  come  to  his 
room  over  the  drug  store,  squared  with  anything  in  his  pre 
vious  experience.  He  had  got  into  a  topsy-turvy  world — a 
wonder-land — a  page  out  of  the  Arabian  Nights,  where  effects 
he  had  always  regarded  as  inevitable,  didn't  follow  causes. 
Helena's  proposal  to  take  him  home  with  her,  openly,  and 
keep  him  there;  her  casual  assurance  that  he  would  not  have 
to  be  accounted  for,  except  as  an  old  friend,  to  her  husband — 
that  was  astounding  enough  to  begin  with.  But  it  was  noth 
ing  to  the  revelation  that  followed,  when  she  outlined  her 
project  for  getting  Bertsch's  money  into  his  hands  by  a  route 
which  the  sharpest-eyed  watcher  of  the  broker's  affairs,  never 
would  suspect. 

"We'll  have  him  make  out  a  check  for  the  full  amount — 
three  thousand  dollars,  isn't  it? — to  my  husband — to  Hugh 
Corbett,  and  mail  it  to  me  here  at  the  house.  !STo  one  would 
look  twice  at  a  check  like  that.  Any  one  would  take  for 
granted  that  it  was  a  perfectly  regular  business  transaction. 
Well,  the  check  will  come  here  to  the  house,  and  I'll  take  it 
to  the  bank  and  deposit  it  to  my  husband's  account.  And 
then  I'll  draw  the  amount  in  currency  in  any  denominations 
you  like,  and  bring  it  home  to  you.  T  don't  see  how  that  can 
go  wrong." 

The  proposal  sounded  stark  mad  to  Gilrain.  It  turned  him 
giddy.  Was  she  proposing  to  forge  her  husband's  name  to  a 
check  ?  And  even  if  she  did,  wouldn't  the  whole  transaction 
lie  bare  before  his  eyes? 

"He'll  never  look,"  she  said.  "And  I've  the  same  right  to 
draw  against  the  account  that  he  has.  It's  a  joint  account. 
My  signature's  just  as  good  as  his." 

She  had  to  go  back  and  explain  in  detail,  before  she  could 
get  it  into  his  head  at  all.  Hugh's  dividend  checks  came  in 
quarterly.  They  were  very  big.  His  income  was  well  over  a 
hundred  and  fifty  thousand  dollars  a  year.  He  took  what  he 
wanted  for  his  laboratory,  she  what  she  wanted  for  the  house 
hold.  When  the  accumulation  in  the  bank  got  too  unrea- 


396  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

sonably  big,  she  called  his  attention  to  the  fact — when  she 
could  get  it — and  they  decided  what  should  be  done  with  it 
in  the  way  of  charities,  investments  and  so  on.  It  was  sho 
who  made  the  dispositions  they  had  decided  upon.  In  was  she 
who  kept  all  accounts,  did  all  the  banking,  got  statements  and 
went  over  the  checks.  She  rather  enjoyed  that  sort  of  work 
and  he  hated  it.  Not  because  he  was  a  fool  about  finance. 
He  understood  it  well  enough,  but  he  had  more  interesting 
things  to  think  about.  Incidentally,  she  was  an  excellent 
bookkeeper. 

The  explanation  did  not  lighten  Gilrain's  bewilderment; 
deepened  it,  on  the  contrary,  tenfold.  Ali  Baba,  having  pro 
nounced  his  "open  sesame,"  could  not  have  stared  more  aghast 
at  the  treasures  in  the  unguarded  cave. 

"See  for  yourself/3  she  had  said,  with  a  laugh,  and  tossed 
him  her  check-book. 

There  it  was  in  black  and  white.  She  had  not  been  raving. 
And  there  she  was ! — A  woman  in  that  amazing  position,  with 
those  amazing  opportunities — the  most  beautiful  woman  he 
had  ever  seen,  and  in  love  with  him !  Utterly  infatuated 
with  him,  she  must  be,  to  run  even  a  momentary  risk  of  losing 
a  position  like  that,  for  him.  A  risk !  You  couldn't  call  it  a 
risk!  She  was  absolutely  courting  destruction,  just  as  she 
had  courted  him. 

Because  that  had  been  the  way  of  it.  It  had  not  been  on 
his  part  a  pursuit  and  a  capture.  Not  even  his  vanity  could 
interpret  the  thing  that  way.  The  strangeness  of  the  situa 
tion,  his  anomalous  position  in  the  household,  the  unfamiliar 
manners  of  this  new  social  stratum  he  had  got  into,  had  intim 
idated  him — held  him  back.  The  initiative  had  been  hers. 
She  had  come  more  than  half-way  to  meet  him. 

Well,  then,  wasn't  it  simple  enough?  Obviously  she  was 
mad  about  him.  Wasn't  it  reasonable  to  suppose  that,  having 
already  ruined  herself  for  him,  (She'd  certainly  done  that. 
Think  what  the  servants  had  seen;  of  the  stories  they'd  have 
to  tell  to  that  blind  fool  of  a  husband  when  he  came  home !) 
wasn't  it  reasonable  to  suppose  that  she'd  come  the  rest  of  the 


THE    WHITE    ARC  397 

way  at  his  whistle? — Run  off  with  him  and  bring  along,  in 
cash,  the  money  represented  by  those  figures  that  still  danced 
before  his  eyes — a  substantial  part  of  it  anyhow,  say  a  hundred 
thousand  dollars?  It  would  not  be  a  theft.  In  the  eyes  of 
the  law  she  could  take  that  as  easily  as  her  husband.  And 
with  as  little  question.  What  a  life  he  could  have  in  a  security 
like  that !  With  a  hundred  thousand  dollars  in  his  pocket,  he 
could  tell  anybody  to  go  to  hell,  even  the  husband.  There  was 
the  great  idea. 

Well,  why  didn't  he  carry  it  out?  What  was  he  afraid 
of?  He  did  not  know.  The  fear  eluded  formulation.  But 
it  was  there.  When  he  brought  himself  to  the  point  of  making 
that  proposal  to  Helena,  somehow  his  throat  went  dry  and  his 
hands  shook — a  sort  of  panic  took  possession  of  him.  Was  she 
really  in  love  with  him?  It  seemed  absurd  to  doubt  it. 
She'd  certainly  given  proofs  enough.  Yet  it  was  a  doubt  that 
never  left  off  tormenting  him.  A  misgiving  that  always 
rankled.  Not  even  the  utmost  ardors  of  passion  could  drive 
it  away.  What  was  her  game!  That  was  the  form  it  took. 
There  was  something  behind  it  all — something  that  the 
strange  look  in  her  eyes,  the  twitch  to  her  smile,  the  intona 
tions  of  her  voice,  perpetually  betrayed,  but  did  not  reveal. 
She  was  steering  her  own  course.  It  was  not  he  who  had  pre 
vailed  over  her.  He  had  not  for  one  moment  prevailed  over 
her.  Never  once  deflected  the  course.  She  was  doing — had 
done  from  the  very  first — exactly  what  she  had  meant  to  do. 
And  it  was  something,  somehow,  that  had  no  reference  to  him. 
He  was  a  dummy — a  symbol — a  servitor  of  her  purpose. 

There,  formulated,  is  the  misgiving  which  he,  for  himself, 
was  unable  to  analyze ;  which  reiterated  itself  with  maddening 
monotony  in  the  question,  what  was  her  game? 

He  had  followed  her  to  her  room,  that  pretty  up-stairs 
sitting-room  of  hers,  with  its  gay  chintzes,  its  soft  pale  rugs, 
and  that  long  chair  where  she  loved  to  stretch  herself  like  a 
great  lazy  cat.  She  waited  by  the  door  and  closed  it  after 
him.  He  turned  an  uneasy  glance  of  protest  toward  it,  and 
she  laughed. 


398  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

"Oh,  I'm  going  to  let  you  go/'  she  said.  "Only  you've 
plenty  of  time.  You  weren't  to  meet  your  people  till  nine, 
you  told  me." 

a Where's  the  money?    Is  it  safe  where  you  left  it?" 

She  lay  back  luxuriously  in  her  chair.  "It's  over  in  the  top 
drawer  of  that  chiffonier." 

He  could  not  interpret  her  nod  in  the  direction  of  it  as  per 
mission  to  go  and  look,  and  turned  back,  with  a  troubled  help 
lessness,  to  her.  Her  look  changed. 

"I  won't  tease  you  any  more,"  she  said.  "You  shall  take  it 
if  you  want  it,  and  go.  Only  I  hoped  I  could  make  you  forget 
it  for  a  little  while.  A  last  little  while.  I  didn't  want  you 
in  such  a  hurry  to  end  it  all." 

The  moment  was  now.  It  could  not  be  postponed  again. 
The  realization  gripped  him  like  a  vise.  He  clenched  his 
hands  and  steadied  himself  with  a  long  breath. 

"I  don't  want  it  ever  to  end,"  he  said. 

"Yes,  but  of  course  it  must.— Mustn't  it?" 

"Not  if  you'd  come  with  me,"  he  said. 

"Bun  off  with  you !"  she  cried  incredulously.  "Now !  To 
night!" 

"To-night,"  he  said,  "or  to-morrow  morning.  You  could — 
join  me  somewhere  to-morrow." 

So  far  so  good.  The  heavens  hadn't  fallen  yet.  That  mys 
terious  look  was  still  in  her  face,  but  it  was  kinder,  somehow — 
softer.  He  forced  himself,  clumsily,  to  begin  making  love 
to  her.  The  old  endearments — the  old  caresses;  half  heart- 
edly,  though,  because  of  the  fear.  Neither  did  she  respond 
to  them  as  she  had  been  wont  to  do;  was  curiously  passive — 
reticent.  It  might  have  been  the  beginning  of  a  love  affair 
instead  of  the  end  of  one. 

"If  it's  no  go,"  he  broke  out  at  last,  "say  so !  Don't  play 
cat  and  mouse  with  me !" 

"I'm  not,"  she  said.  "I'm  thinking  about  it  seriously.  I 
think  perhaps  I'll  go  with  you.  Only  I'm  taken  by  surprise. 
I  never  dreamed  of  your  proposing  that.  I  must  have  $,  little 
time  to  think." 


THE    WHITE    AEG  399 

Once  more  he  essayed  the  conventional  lover's  attitude — • 
his  pleas  and  protestations;  what  comrades  they  would  be — 
what  a  wonderful  life  they  vrculd  have  together.  He  dropped 
down  beside  her  and  would  have  fondled  her,  but  she  turned 
from  him  impatiently. 

"Don't  try  to  come  close  now/"'  she  said.  "Go  away.  Over 
there,  and  let  me  think." 

After  a  little  silence,  she  began  to  talk.  Thinking  aloud  it 
was,  rather — an  attempt  to  visualize  the  sort  of  life  it  would 
be;  the  experiences  that  such  a  pair  of  adventurers  would 
have  to  look  forward  to.  That  was  the  note  of  it.  Adventure 
— daring !  Sherwood  Forest,  not  Arcady.  A  warfare  upon  the 
upholstered  people  of  the  world — the  fat — the  complacent — 
the  secure — the  respectable;  like  these  Corbetts  she  had  come 
to  hate. 

She  had  reverted  to  a  former  Helena — the  stormy  petrel — 
the  adventurer.  No  longer  on  a  high  horse,  though.  A  week 
ago  she  had  looked  upon  life  as  an  impasse.  But  was  there  a 
little  door  of  escape  after  all  ?  She  had  thought  to  pull  down 
the  pillars  of  her  temple  like  Sampson  among  the  Philistines. 
She  had  pulled  them  down.  But  was  she  alive  after  all? 
Could  she  become  a  new  Helena  once  more,  with  a  new  life 
in  front  of  her  ?  Her  courage  had  not  faltered  before  pulling 
down  the  pillars.  But  was  it  equal  to  facing  the  road — a 
crooked  narrow  little  road  like  that?  A  life  of  flying  by 
night  and  living  as  one  could,  in  company  with  this  rather 
likable  impostor,  who,  strangely  enough,  had  fallen  in  love 
with  her — wanted  her? 

She  had  been  thinking  aloud,  as  I  have  said.  But  Gilrain, 
over  by  the  window,  had  not  heard  half  of  it,  nor  understood 
half  that  he  had  heard.  He  did  understand,  however,  that  she 
was  hesitating — reluctant — doubtful  of  her  own  fortitude. 
And  he  thought,  naturally  enough,  that  he  understood  why. 
Hardship — poverty.  She  didn't  realize  her  opportunities. 
Time  was  slipping  away.  That  husband  of  hers  might,  any 
moment  now,  be  slipping  his  latch-key  into  the  street  door. 
Still,  unaccountably,  the  words  stuck  in  his  throat.  But  he 


400  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

got  them  out;  not  looking  at  her,  though.  He  stayed  at  the 
window,  his  gaze  ranging  over  the  snowy  moonlit  roofs. 

"We  wouldn't  have  to  be  poor,"  he  said.  "Nor  shady.  We 
could  be  respectable.  Don't  you  see?  You  could  take  the 
money — as  much  of  it  as  you  wanted  to.  All  of  it.  They 
couldn't  touch  you  for  that.  It's  yours  by  law,  as  much  as  it 
is  his.  He'd  get  a  divorce,  I  suppose,  and  then  we  could — m — 
marry,  if  you  wanted  to.  And  I'd  be  on  the  level  with  you. 
We  could  be  real  people." 

He  had  felt  from  the  beginning  that  he  was  talking  into  a 
vacuum.  No  sound  came  from  her  at  all.  She  hadn't  moved, 
he  knew,  from  that  long  chair  of  hers.  But  he  felt,  with 
mounting  panic,  a  sense  of  something  behind  him,  gathering 
itself  up  for  a  spring.  His  words  died  away  to  a  mumble  and 
presently  ceased  of  sheer  inanition.  But  he  did  not  turn  until 
he  heard  her  spring  from  the  chair.  Then  he  whipped  round 
and  his  hand  involuntarily  sought  the  pocket  of  his  coat.  But 
it  dropped  at  his  side  as  the  other  one  did.  He  turned  white 
and  leaned  back  against  the  high  window-sill  for  support. 

The  face  of  the  woman  who  confronted  him  was  literally 
terrible.  Her  mouth  wore  a  sort  of  smile. 

"You  dog !"  she  said.  And  again,  after  a  moment,  in  a 
whisper,  "You  dog !" 

His  glance  wavered  away  from  hers  and  sought  the  chiffon 
ier  where  she  had  said  the  money  was.  He  must  have  that. 
Bertsch  would  hound  him  to  death  if  he  didn't  get  that. 
What  a  fool  he  had  been.  He'd  known  it  would  turn  out  like 
this.  Known  it  all  the  while.  There  was  a  lump  in  his  throat 
as  if  he  were  going  to  cry.  What  right  had  she  to  be  in  a 
rage  like  that?  What  had  he  done  anyhow? 

She  had  followed  the  direction  of  his  look  toward  the  chif 
fonier,  and  like  a  flash,  was  there  before  him,  and  faced  him 
from  there  with  her  back  to  it. 

He  had  followed  her  a  step  or  two,  but  stopped  when  she 
turned.  He  was  going  to  fling  her  out  of  the  way  and  take 
that  money  and  go.  Of  course  that  was  what  he  was  going 
to  do.  He  was  strong  enough,  wasn't  lie,  to  thrust  a  woman 
out  of  the  way  when  she  stood  between  him  and  something 


THE   WRITE    ARC  401 

he  wanted?  He  would  be  as  soon  as  he  could  get  over  this 
trembling  fit. 

She  said:  "I'm  going  to  tell  yon  something.  I  hate  my 
husband  because  I'm  in  love  with  him.  Because  I  never  could 
make  him  hate  me.  You  can't  understand  that.  But  you're 
going  to  listen  until  I'm  done.  He  never  would  beat  me  when 
I  deserved  to  be  beaten.  Nothing  I  did  to  him  made  him  even 
take  hold  of  me  to  hurt.  He  would  just  stand  and  think.  And 
then  go  away,  looking  as  if  I  were  something  he  didn't  want 
to — touch. 

"We  quarreled  a  week  ago,  and  I  played  my  last  card ;  said 
the  last  thing  to  him  that  a  man  could  endure  to  have  said. 
And  he  looked  at  me  and  went  away. 

"Why  do  you  suppose  I  picked  you  up  and  brought  you 
here?  Wiry,  because  I  wanted  to  use  you — to  do  the  thing  I 
couldn't  do  alone — to  make  a  final  smash  of  it  that  he  couldn't 
ignore;  that  that  precious  family  of  his  wouldn't  let  him 
ignore.  I  had  nothing  against  you.  I  half  liked  you.  That 
wasn't  why  I  made  love  to  you.  It  was  because  having  a 
lover  was  striking  a  blow  at  him.  I  wanted  to  see  how  he'd 
look  when  I'd  told  him  what  I'd  done. 

"But  when  you  asked  me  to  go  with  you,  I  thought  I  would. 
It  amused  me  that  you  should  have  fallen  in  love  with  me. 
That  you  should  ask  me,  the  way  you  did,  to  go  away  from 
all  this  and  share  your  life  with  you.  Your  shifting,  mean  lit 
tle  life. 

"But  I  wasn't  what  you  wanted.  You  wanted  his  money. 
That's  what  you've  been  making  those  eyes  about  from  the 
first.  And  you  didn't  even  want  me  to  steal  it  with  you  hon 
estly.  You  talked  about  the  law  to  me !  Talked  about  being 
safe  and  respectable.  I  didn't  suppose  that  anything  as  base 
as  you  crawled  on  the  earth." 

"Come  now,"  he  said,  "where  is  that  money?" 

She  turned,  snatched  open  the  drawer  and  rummaged  in  it 
with  both  hands.  It  was  full  of  soft  lacy  things.  But  his 
ear  told  him  that  there  wras  something  hard  in  there  and 
heavy,  and  as  her  hand  encountered  it,  the  exploring  move 
ment  was  suddenly  arrested  and  she  stood  most  tensely  still. 


402  Atf   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

"You're  no  fitter  to  live  than  I  am  myself,"  she  said. 

His  eye  caught  a  gleam  of  polished  metal.  So  that  was  what 
she  had  there  !  That  was  what  she  meant  to  do,  damn  her ! 

It  was  with  one  convulsive  movement  that  he  snatched  the 
little  revolver  from  his  side  pocket  and  fired  it. 

Then,  frozen,  breathless,  he  watched  her  fall.  It  was  in 
credible  how  slowly  it  happened ;  how  long  it  took.  His  eyes 
were  on  one  of  her  hands  that  clutched  weakly  at  the  corner 
of  the  chiffonier.  It  slipped  and  clutched  again,  and  at  last 
relaxed. 

He  gave  a  sob  of  relief  when  she  lay  still. 

He  put  the  little  revolver  back  in  his  pocket,  drew  in  an 
other  long  breath,  went  forward,  skirting  where  she  lay,  and 
reached  into  that  top  drawer. 

The  money  was  there — a  bundle  of  it.  He  thrust  it  into  his 
breast  pocket.  His  hand  explored  the  drawer  again.  The  re 
volver  was  there,  too.  He  took  it  out  and  looked  at  it  stupidly, 
as  if  he  did  not  know  what  to  do  with  it.  Then  he  stooped, 
laid  it  on  the  floor  near  her  hand,  and  tiptoed  out  of  the  room. 

On  the  floor  below  he  turned  into  the  room  that  had  been 
his,  took  up  his  bag  and  went  on  down-stairs  with  it.  In  the 
hall  he  put  on  his  overcoat  and  hat.  Then  he  went  out.  He 
had  met  no  one. 


CHAPTER  XXXI 

THERE  was  an  incredible  lot  of  blood.  The  pale  silken 
rug  on  which  v=he  had  fallen  was  sodden  with  it — a  dark 
purple — and  a  sharply  outlined  continent  of  it  lay  map- 
wise  on  the  floor.  But  that,  the  beginning  of  the  horror,  was 
also  the  end  of  it,  for  there  was,  about  the  attitude  of  the  body, 
nothing  of  that  convulsive  distortion  in  which  violent  death 
so  often  grotesquely  masks  itself.  It  was  still  Helena  lying 
there,  dead  and  marble  white,  but  as  she  had  familiarly  lain 
in  life,  utterly  relaxed;  utterly — somehow — satisfied.  The 
eyelids  had  drooped  shut.  The  colorless  lips  were  parted. 

Wondering — awed  beyond  the  possibility  of  feeling  any 
other  emotion — Hugh  softly  crossed  the  room  and  knelt  beside 
her  and  pressed  his  hand  upon  her  breast  where  now  the  heart 
was  still,  to  make  his  first  acquaintance  with  Death.  What 
a  superb — finality  there  was  about  it !  What  a  guarantee  of 
good  faith  it  gave !  The  only  ultimate  guarantee. 

The  natural  emotions,  grief,  pity,  self-reproach,  eluded  him 
altogether  as  he  knelt  there  gazing  at  her.  They — or  the 
positive  negations  of  them — would  come  in  time  to  him,  to 
harass  or  sustain.  There  would  come,  too,  in  the  near  ap 
proaching  hours,  a  review  of  the  strange  stormy  life  they  had 
led  together ;  the  attempt  at  a  solution  of  its  moral  enigmas — 
the  search  for  a  clew  to  the  meaning  of  it  all.  All  he  could 
feel  now  was  a  curious  futility — a  sense  of  having  been  out 
done — left  behind.  There  was  something  strangely  triumph 
ant  about  this  last  still  relaxation  of  hers.  He  could  read  the 
sighing,  contented,  "It  is  finished  I'9  upon  her  parted  lips. 

"We  should  only  destroy  each  other,  you  and  I/'  She  had 
said  that  to  him  years  ago,  up  there  in  Alice  Haves'  flat,  the 
day  of  his  first  visit.  He  had  been  talking  confidently,  like 
the  sophomore  he  was,  about  the  possibilities  of  their  "friend- 

403 


AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

ship."  She  had  seen  clearly  enough  then.  Had  she  ever  been 
blind?  Or,  open-eyed,  had  she  challenged  the  destruction  she 
saw?  Challenge!  That  had  always  been  the  note  of  her. 
And  now,  in  the  acceptance  of  this  last  challenge  of  hers,  she 
had  found — peace. 

The  last  time  he  had  seen  her — a  week  ago — here  in  this 
very  room — he  had  hated  her;  had  wanted  to  kill  her  for  the 
abominations  she  had  uttered  about  Jean.  That  was  what  she 
had  invited  him  to  do — challenged  him  to  do.  And  he  had 
looked  at  her  and  gone  away,  hating  her.  But  it  was  a  futile 
hatred.  He  had  not  said  a  word ;  had  not  lifted  a  hand.  A 
hatred  she  could  smile  at  now.  He  glanced  at  her  lips  again 
to  see  if  the  smile  was  there. 

The  hatred  was  gone — the  loathing — the  horror  of  her, 
that  he  had  brought  with  him  to-night  fairly  to  the  threshold 
of  this  room. 

There  had  been,  indeed,  a  strong  access  of  it  in  the  last 
few  minutes  before  he  turned  into  his  house.  It  had  been 
sharpened  to  an  edge.  A  face  had  thrust  itself  into  his  pre 
occupation  just  as  he  and  Greg,  walking  back  from  the  lab 
oratory,  were  approaching  the  point  where  their  ways  would 
naturally  have  parted. 

He  had  been  a  thousand  fathoms  deep,  of  course ;  had  hardly 
spoken  to  Gregory  in  the  whole  mile  they  had  just  walked 
together.  Indeed,  had  hardly  been  conscious  he  was  there. 
But  this  face,  the  face  of  a  man  walking  toward  them,  close 
to  the  building  line,  but  coming  just  here  into  the  luminous 
zone  of  a  drug-store  window,  became  suddenly  and  sharply 
visible  to  him — a  pale  face,  dabbled,  shiny  with  sweat.  He 
had  gripped  Gregory's  arm  and  commanded  him  to  look.  He 
had  felt  his  brother's  muscles  turn  to  steel  under  his  fingers, 
but  Gregory  had  not  spoken  until  after  the  man,  walking 
straight  along — not  noticeably  fast,  doggedly  and  with  rigid 
eyes,  like  a  somnambulist — had  passed.  Then  he  had  said 
what  Hugh,  somehow,  had  already  guessed. 

"That's  Gilrain !    That's  the  man !" 

They  had  paused  and  looked  back  after  him.  And  then, 
Gregory's  eyes  having  asked  a  question  which  Hugh's  sharp 


THE    WHITE    AltC  405 

shake  of  the  head  had  answered,  they  had  walked  on  to 
gether. 

Unidentified,  the  look  of  the  man  would  have  been  repulsive. 
An  abject  surrender  to  panic  is  always  that.  But  as  Helena's 
lover — the  creature  her  hands  had  caressed,  her  lips  had  kissed 
— the  rat-like  thing,  huddling  along  in  the  shadows,  dropped 
below  the  level  of  human  accountability  and  vengeance  alto 
gether  !  Became  the  mere  symbol  of  the  loathing  Hugh  felt 
for  his  wife. 

Gregory's,  "Something's  happened — for  him  to  look  like 
that !  I'm  going  home  with  you  !"  was  accepted  by  his  logical 
faculties  as  reasonable  enough,  and  he  fell  in  with  the  quick 
ened  pace  that  Gregory  took. 

Indeed,  this  premonition  mounted  in  a  swift  gradient  to 
certitude  as  they  entered  the  silent  but  brightly  lighted  house, 
looked  into  the  dining-room  where  all  was  just  as  the  two  who 
had  dined  there  had  left  it;  the  coffee-cups,  the  half-emptied 
glasses,  the  little  silver  ash-tray  with  the  extinguished  ends  of 
two  or  three  of  Helena's  cigarettes  on  it.  Where  were  the 
servants  who  should  have  come  in  to  clear  away? 

No,  the  tragedy,  as  such,  had  not  been  a  surprise  to  Hugh, 
when  from  the  threshold,  he  had  looked  in  upon  it.  The 
bewildering  thing  had  been  the  sudden  recession  of  all  the 
horror  and  disgust  he  had  brought  to  that  doorway  with  him. 
The  tranquillity  of  a  last  supreme  satisfaction  was  as  legible 
in  the  white  body  he  knelt  above,  as  a  seal  set  in  hardening 
wax. 

It  came  upon  him,  a  haunting  surmise  with  all  the  force 
of  a  demonstrated  conviction,  that  the  man  Gregory  had  called 
her  lover — the  loathsome  rat  they  had  seen  out  there  in  the 
street — had  no  real  significance  in  the  affair;  had  been  a 
merely  casual  instrument — the  first  that  came  to  hand — in 
the  accomplishment  of  her  now  completed  purpose.  Com 
pleted,  no  doubt  of  that!  She  had  finished  her  course.  She 
had  kept.  .  .  Some  sort  of  faith,  obscure  to  him,  she  must 
have  kept,  or  the  transubstantiation  of  death  would  not  have 
left  her  beautiful,  like  this. 

The  surmise  glanced  forward  again,  lifted  another  horizon. 


106  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

This  course  of  hers,  this  seeming  devious  course,  and  this 
obscure  faith,  had  they  a  reference — some  sort  of  constant 
reference — to  himself?  Was  he  the  object  of  her  perpetual 
challenge?  Was  it  to  him  that  she  had  been  trying,  vainly 
till  now,  to  bring  something  home  ?  And  was  it  the  belief  that 
she  had,  at  last,  succeeded  that  had  left  that  look  of  ineffable 
contentment  on  her  parted  lips  ? 

He  must  solve  the  riddle,  somehow.  But  not  now.  There 
must  be  things  to  do.  A  hundred  things.  Gregory  must  be 
somewhere.  He  rose  and  went  to  the  door  and  called  him; 
voicelessly  at  first,  but  again  in  a  voice  that  sounded  naturally 
enough. 

Even  Gregory,  looking  thoughtfully  down  upon  her,  gave 
her  the  grace  of  a  long  moment  of  silence,  and  it  was  with  an 
evident  effort  that  he  roused  himself,  laid  a  consolatory  grip 
on  Hugh's  shoulder  and — took  charge. 

"There's  no  doubt  but  it's  all  over,  is  there?"  His  voice 
had  the  brusk  deep  tone  one  hears  in  crises.  "She's  quite 
dead?" 

Hugh's  "Yes,"  was  a  little  startled.  It  had  not  occurred  to 
him  to  doubt  it.  He  added,  "Yes,  I'm  sure." 

"The  doctor's  the  first  thing,  anyhow,  I  guess.  Shall  I  try 
to  get  Darby?"  Darby  was  one  of  Chicago's  most  eminent 
surgeons,  but  the  Corbetts,  antedating  his  fame,  were  among 
the  few  barnacles  of  a  general  practise  that  he  had  never 
scraped  off. 

Formalities,  however  necessary,  were  not  in  the  focus  of 
Hugh's  mind  at  all.  He  assented  indifferently  to  Darb} . 
Gregory,  however,  did  not  move  toward  the  telephone — 
stayed  where  he  was,  looking  thoughtfully  down  at  Helena. 

"I'm  glad  it  happened — this  way,"  he  said,  indicating  the 
revolver  which  lay  beside  her  hand.  "This  way  rather  than 
the  other.  I  mean,  that  she  shot  herself  instead  of  .  .  ." 

He  broke  off  and  looked  closer ;  stooped  down,  stared,  took 
up  the  revolver  and  scrutinized  it.  Then  he  put  it  back,  ac 
curately,  where  it  had  been. 

"She  didn't  do  it  herself,"  he  said  in  a  changed  voice. 
"She  was  shot— murdered.  By  Gilrain." 


THE    WHITE    ARC  407 

Hugh  considered  this  in  silence  for  a  moment.  Then 
gravely  he  said,  "That  doesn't  change  anything,  really.  It 
conies  to  just  the  same  thing." 

In  the  context  of  his  own  thoughts  this  comment  was  clear 
enough.  Death  was  still,  he  meant  to  say,  the  completest 
expression  of  the  thing  she  had  sought;  still  represented, 
somehow,  a  triumphant  accomplishment — self-inflicted  or  not. 
The  murderer's  bullet  had  been  challenged — welcome. 

But  to  Gregory — naturally  enough — this  was  lunacy. 

"Old  man !"  he  expostulated  patiently.  "Try  to  think  what 
it  means.  It  means  that  the  whole  rotten  story  will  have  to 
come  out.  Every  rag  of  it.  It  won't  take  two  minutes  for 
them  to  see  that  it  isn't  an  ordinary  burglary  murder.  They'll 
question  the  servants.  Where  are  all  the  servants,  anyhow? 
And  they'll  question  us.  And  they'll  have  enough  to  go  on, 
God  knows,  right  there.  The  whole  pack  will  be  loose — de 
tectives,  reporters,  photographers,  sob-writers.  They  won't 
miss  one  dirty  rag  of  it.  If  Gilrain's  caught,  there'll  be  a 
trial.  If  he  isn't,  there'll  be  a  hunt  for  him.  I  don't  know 
which  will  be  worse.  That's  the  difference  it  makes.  Un 
less  .  .  ." 

"That  mustn't  happen,"  Hugh  said.  "That  can't  be  allowed 
to  happen.  The  thing  wasn't  the  way  it  looks  to  you.  There 
was  something  in  it  you  don't  understand.  I  don't  myself, 
clearly.  But  she  doesn't  deserve  to  be  dragged  through  the 
mud,  and  she  shan't  be !  I'll  protect  her  from  that,  anyhow." 

Gregor}T  nodded  and  gripped  his  brother's  shoulder  once 
more.  And  this  time  with  a  much  more  genuine  feeling. 

"It  will  want  thinking  out,"  lie  said,  and  then  walked 
irresolutely  over  toward  the  telephone.  "We  can't  have 
Darby,  that's  the  first  thing.  We'll  need  a  crook — a  man  we 
can  buy.  And  we'll  need  the  same  kind  of  a  trained  nurse. 
And  an  undertaker  and  his  assistant.  There  are  four  we'll  have 
to  buy,  body  and  soul.  And  the  servants,  here  in  the  house. 
All  but  Martha.  She'd  stand  by,  from  loyalty  to  the  family, 
I  think.  That  chauffeur  of  yours.  He'll  have  seen  more  or 
less,  too.  We've  got  to  get  them  all.  Because  there  can't  be 
even  a  whisper." 


408  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

Hugh  had  dropped  into  a  chair.  His  face  was  whitening, 
his  eyes  looked  sick,  as  the  foul  tide  rose  higher  around  him. 
But  he  nodded  a  dazed  assent. 

There  was  a  moment  of  silence.  Then,  abruptly,  Gregory 
turned  away  from  the  telephone  and  faced  him. 

"Hugh,  it  can't  be  done !  It's  impossible !  Because  of  what 
they'll  think.  What  every  one  of  them  will  think,  the  minute 
the  proposition  is  put  up  to  them.  They'll  think  you  killed 
her  yourself.  They're  bound  to.  And  that  means  that,  some 
how,  it  would  all  come  out,  including  our  attempt  to  shut 
it  up.  And  when  it  did,  you'd  be  done  for — don't  you  sec? 
Because  then  it  would  be  too  late  for  us  to  tell  the  truth.  My 
word  wouldn't  be  any  better  than  yours." 

That,  curiously,  brought  Hugli  out  of  his  daze.  He  rose 
deliberately  from  his  chair,  walked  over  to  the  window  and 
for  a  little  while,  stood  staring  out  over  the  snowy  roofs.  Then 
he  came  back  to  Gregory. 

"All  right,"  he  said,  "we'll  let  it  go  at  that— let  it  look 
like  that.  That's  disastrous,  but  not — filthy.  And  it's  truer, 
somehow,  than  the  other.  It  was  I  that  killed  her,  you  might 
say.  She  saw  it  all.  It  was  all  in  her  voice  when  she  tele 
phoned  to  me  out  at  the  laboratory  last  Saturday.  Oh,  I'm 
not  raving !  Or  at  least,  not  much.  There's  a  sort  of  truth 
in  it.  Anyhow,  Gilrain  doesn't  figure — except  by  chance.  She'd 
have  found  somebody." 

Up  to  that  point  he  had  spoken  quite  collectedly.  But  at 
Gregory's  incredulous  stare,  he  went  to  pieces. 

"Oh,  you  don't  have  to  understand  it !"  he  cried  frantically. 
"I  won't  have  the  other  thing,  that's  all  you  need  to  know ! 
I  won't  have  it !  I'll  take  it  on  myself." 

"You  won't,"  said  Gregory.  "It  may  suit  you  to  get  your 
self  hanged  for  murder,  but  don't  your  father  and  mother,  and 
your  brothers  and  sisters  count  for  anything?  Yourself! 
Good  God,  Hugh,  isn't  there  anybody  but  yourself  in  the 
world?" 

Hugh's  face  was  that  of  a  man  in  a  nightmare.  He  had 
added  one  more  name  to  Gregory's  catalogue.  He  turned  back 
unsteadily  to  his  chair. 


THE    WHITE    ABC  409 

"You're  quite  right/'  he  said.  "I  can't  protect  her  that 
way.  I'm — a  little  out  of  my  head,  I  guess,  in  addition  to 
being  a  fool.  You'll  have  to  take  charge.  I'll  do  as  you  say." 
Then: 

"We  don't  have  to  leave  her  lying  there,  do  we?  Can't  I 
take  her  and  put  her  in  on  her  bed  ?" 

Gregory  nodded,  and  refrained  from  offering  to  help.  It 
wasn't  necessary  of  course.  He  waited  until  Hugh  had  carried 
his  burden  into  the  adjoining  room  before,  at  the  telephone, 
he  went  to  work. 


CHAPTER  XXXII 

A1ERE  foot-note  is  all  that  remains  to  be  made  upon  this 
tragic  conclusion  of  Helena  Corbett's  stormy  life  ad 
venture.  An  ironic  sort  of  foot-note  it  happens  to  be. 
For  one  of  the  consequences  of  that  last  week  of  here,  of  the 
pulling  down  of  the  pillars  of  her  temple,  conspicuously — 
maliciously,  I  might  almost  say — falsified  her  expectations. 
The  Corbett  family,  those  upholstered  complacent  Corbetts, 
put  in  the  pillory  for  once,  wincing  at  sneers  to  which  no 
answers  could  be  made,  trying  with  a  sort  of  ludicrous  futility 
to  wipe  oft'  the  stain  of  an  indelible  disgrace ;  that  expectation, 
which  must  have  been  in  the  back  of  her  mind  from  the  be 
ginning  to  the  end  of  her  episode  with  Gilrain,  was  never 
realized. 

There  was  indeed  the  space  of  an  hour  or  two  when  they 
confronted  it.  Constance  and  Frank  Crawford,  that  is  to  say, 
and  shrewd  old  Doctor  Darby,  a  Mr.  Worldly-Wise  Man,  if  ever 
one  there  was,  and  Rodney  Aklrich,  all  summoned  in  the  first 
five  minutes  Greg  worked  at  the  telephone.  Five  unusually 
acute  intelligences,  these  were;  but  it  was,  after  all,  due  to 
no  resourcefulness  of  theirs  that  the  almost  unendurable 
course  of  events  they  foresaw  was  evaded.  It  was  partly  plain 
good  luck,  and  partly  a  shrewd  guess  by  a  member  of  that 
tribe  whose  activities  they  dreaded  the  worst,  a  reporter. 

The  good  luck  was  this :  when  Gregory,  summoning  all  the 
resolution  he  possessed,  informed  the  police  at  the  Chicago 
Avenue  Station  that  his  brother's  wife  had  been  found  mur 
dered  in  her  boudoir,  and  that  the  family  had  reason  to  suspect 
that  a  man  calling  himself  Frank  Gilrain  was  the  murderer, 
he  was  cut  short  in  the  middle  of  his  statement  as  to  how  the 
man  looked,  and  where  he  had  last  been  seen,  by  the  amazing 
information  that  Gilrain  was  then  already  locked  in  a  cell, 

410 


THE    WHITE    ARC  411 

booked  under  the  charge  of  carrying  concealed  weapons;  and 
that  a  search  had  revealed  the  fact  that  he  had  on  his  person 
a  sum  of  thirty-two  hundred  dollars,  in  bills  of  large  de 
nomination. 

The  theory  of  robbery  was  too  easy  and  obvious  for  the 
police  not  to  jump  at.  Greg  and  Rodney  knew,  of  course,  that 
this  theory  could  not  hold  water  for  more  than  an  hour  or 
two ;  but  it  did  give  them  time  to  breathe,  and  Gregory  man 
aged  a  non-committal  answer  to  the  question  whether  or  not 
that  sum  of  money  had  been  taken  from  Hugh's  house,  prom 
ised  an  immediate  investigation,  and  hung  up. 

"I  never  kept  any  money  about/'  Hugh  said,  when  they 
questioned  him,  "but  I  don't  know  about  Helena.  She  does 
all  the  banking  and  bookkeeping.  She  is  very  good  at  that — 
was,  I  mean.  You  will  find  everything  in  good  order,  I 
imagine,  right  in  her  desk  there." 

With  this  permission  it  didn't  take  them  a  minute  to  find 
the  counter-foil  of  the  check,  the  last  she  ever  drew,  for  thirty- 
two  hundred  dollars,  made  out  to  currency.  It  crossed  their 
minds  at  once  that  she  had  drawn  it  for  Gilrain,  and  the  ques 
tion  under  what  influence,  what  compulsion,  she  had  done  it 
asked  itself  instantly.  But  when  Hugh  got  the  drift  of  their 
thoughts,  he  discouraged  the  notion  that  they  had  found 
the  clew. 

"Blackmail  ?"  he  said,  witH  a  smile.  "You  will  draw  blank 
in  that  cover.  She  never  would  have  tried  to  buy  silence  from 
anybody." 

He  added  quietly  to  Constance,  "There  are  a  lot  of  things 
she  wasn't  that  she  might  have  been;  things  that  plenty  of 
us  are." 

He  proved  to  be  right  about  that.  The  search  they  made 
through  her  letters  and  papers  revealed  no  hint  that  she  had 
felt  herself  in  anybody's  power,  let  alone  in  Gilrain's.  They 
were  still  completely  at  a  loss,  therefore,  when  Rodney  and 
Greg  went  down  into  the  drawing-room  about  ten  o'clock  to 
receive  the  reporters. 

They  were  much  too  wise,  of  course,  to  attempt  to  take 
the  line  that  this  was  a  private  matter,  none  of  the  public's 


AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

business.  Greg  told,  with  an  admirable  appearance  of  com 
plete  candor,  the  story  of  his  return  to  the  house  with  Hugh 
from  the  laboratory  where  they  had  been  discussing  a  matter 
of  important  business.  He  told  how  they  feund  the  body; 
made  a  note  on  the  absence  of  the  servants,  and  the  servants' 
explanation  of  how  it  came  about.  He  described  the  loaded 
but  undischarged  revolver,  which  lay  by  Helena's  hand,  and 
admitted  that  the  nature  of  the  wound  precluded  the  theory 
of  suicide.  When  he  got  to  the  end  of  the  story,  he  answered 
their  questions  about  the  facts  freely. 

But  when  the  questioners  asked  for  theories,  speculations, 
he  turned  them  over  to  Rodney,  and  Rodney,  while  he  made 
no  bones  of  admitting  that  they  had  a  theory  which  accounted 
for  the  crime,  was  adamant  when  it  came  to  revealing  it. 
Publication  at  this  stage  would  be  fatally  premature,  and  the 
issue  was  so  grave  that  he  didn't  even  feel  justified  in  taking 
them  into  his  confidence,  though  he  knew  how  high  a  standard 
the  newspapers,  in  the  main,  lived  up  to  in  the  matter  of 
respecting  such  confidence. 

This  was  pure  bluff.  He  and  Frank  and  Gregory  were  cast 
ing  about  desperately  for  a  theory  other  than  the  amorous  one 
which  was  staring  them  in  the  face.  But  the  admission  that 
they  had  no  theory  would  have  fired  the  imagination  of  every 
one  of  those  reporters,  and  by  one  o'clock,  when  the  papers 
went  to  press,  there  would  have  been  half  a  dozen  which  their 
respective  authors  would  have  been  ready  to  fight  for  to  the 
last  gasp. 

One  of  the  group,  who  went  away  with  a  good  grace  enough 
when  Rodney  dismissed  them,  was  a  man  both  he  and  Gregory 
had  encountered  professionally  before.  In  the  presence  of 
the  others  he  had  made  no  parade  of  this  fact,  had  kept  in  the 
background,  rather,  and  asked  only  a  few  perfunctory  ques 
tions.  But  half  an  hour  after  the  others  had  gone,  he  came 
bfiok,  and  asked  for  a  private  interview.  He  was  the  sort  of 
reporter,  in  these  days  of  cooperative  press  bureaus  and  re 
write  men,  oftener  encountered  in  fiction  than  in  fact — a 
veteran  of  the  old  tradition. 

"I  haven't  come  to  ask  for  anything  to  publish/'  he  as- 


THE   WHITE   ARC  413 

sured  Rodney,  who  received  him.  "I  have  an  idea  I  know 
what  your  theory  of  the  crime  is.  At  least,  I  have  one  of  my 
own,  and  I  suspect  yours  squares  with  it.  I  am  not  going  to 
ask  you  to  confirm  it,  either,  unless  you  like."  He  paused 
there  for  a  moment,  then  deliberately  shot  his  question  in. 
"Has  Mr.  Hugh  Corbett's  work  in  his  laboratory  lately  had 
anything  to  do  with  the  war?" 

Rodney  is  still  proud  and  amazed  over  the  feat  of  self- 
control  he  then  and  there  performed,  in  not  embracing  that 
reporter  with  a  gasp  of  joy.  He  held  his  breath  for  ten 
seconds,  before  he  trusted  himself  to  speak;  but  when  he  did 
it  was  in  his  coldest  professional  tone.  "I  can't  feel  war 
ranted  in  answering  that  question  without  consulting  Cor 
bett,"  he  said. 

"I'll  give  you  a  little  more  to  go  on  before  you  do  that," 
the  reporter  went  on.  "That  is  not  just  a  snap  guess  of  mine. 
I  have  been  working  on  these  German  spy  cases  for  months. 
Their  main  industry,  just  now,  is  blowing  up  munitions  plants, 
of  course,  and  I  have  no  doubt  they  have  laid  some  sort  of 
plans  for  the  Corbett  works  at  Riverdale;  but  it  strikes  me 
that  there  may  be  an  even  closer  connection  through  the 
laboratory.  I  suppose  they  think  they  already  know  all  there 
is  to  know  about  metallurgy.  Still  they  would  hardly  leave 
a  man  as  famous  in  that  line  as  Hugh  Corbett  without  paying 
him  some  attention. 

"Well,  here's  where  it  joins  on.  They're  doing  most  of  their 
work  through  the  I.  W.  W.,  and  other  radicals  and  pacifists 
and,  of  course,  Mrs.  Corbett's  connections  with  those  circles 
are  well  known.  It  strikes  me  as  natural  that  they  should 
approach  her,  and  that  there  might  have  been  some  conflict 
in  her  mind  between  what  she  took  to  be  her  duty  under  her 
principles  and  her  loyalty  to  her  husband.  Or,  for  that  mat 
ter,  she  may  simply  have  been  leading  them  on  all  the  while 
with  the  idea  of  finding  out  what  they  meant  to  do,  not  real 
izing  perhaps  how  desperate  they  were,  or  what  a  serious 
business  it  was.  Well,  there's  my  theory,  and  you  can  see 
for  yourself  how  my  question  fit?  into  it." 

"I  think  Corbett  will  be  willing  to  answer  your  question, 


414  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

but  I'll  go  and  ask  him,"  Rodney  said,  and  managed  not  to 
burst  until  lie  got  out  of  the  room.  They  gave  that  reporter 
the  answer  he  wanted,  told  him  that  the  work  Hugh  was 
doing  in  his  laboratory  had  indeed  something  to  with  the 
war.  If  they  had  dared,  they  would  have  given  him  a  thou 
sand  dollars  as  an  unworthy  token  of  their  gratitude.  He 
had  shown  them  the  way  out — the  only  possible  way  out. 

They  found  in  Helena's  bank-book  the  deposit  of  that  last 
three  thousand  dollars.  They  asked  Hugh  about  this  and 
found  that  it  was  nothing  he  knew  about.  Frank  Crawford 
was  a  director  in  that  bank,  so  they  assigned  him  the  job  of 
discovering  where  the  check  came  from ;  and  about  one  o'clock 
that  night  a  shivering  receiving  teller,  answering  the  phone  in 
his  pajamas,  confidently  told  him.  Yes,  it  was  a  thing  he 
would  be  willing  to  swear  to.  They  had  been  watching 
Bertsch's  checks  for  weeks,  under  instructions  to  report  any 
thing  that  looked  at  all  suspicious.  Hugh's  denial  that  he 
had  ever  done  any  business  with  Bertsch,  on  top  of  this,  gave 
them  something  more  than  conjecture  to  go  on. 

With  that,  Rodney  went  to  the  state's  attorne}7,  next  morn 
ing  at  breakfast  time,  and  contrived  to  convince  him — without 
presenting  the  situation  directly  in  that  light,  that  there  was 
more  kudos  for  him  in  the  political  aspect  of  the  crime  than 
in  the  personal.  He  took  Rodney  to  his  office  with  him,  and 
sent  for  Gil  rain. 

By  ten  o'clock  Gilrain  had  made  a  confession — in  the  main 
true.  Helena,  he  said,  had  agreed  to  rescue  him  from  the 
presumably  treacherous  doctor  whom  Bertsch  had  consigned 
him  to,  to  shelter  him  for  a  week,  and  to  serve  as  intermediary 
between  Bertsch  and  himself,  for  the  transfer  of  the  three 
thousand  dollars  necessary  to  carry  out  their  plans.  But  at  the 
last  moment,  he  said,  she  had  welshed,  and  upon  his  demand 
ing  the  three  thousand  dollars  which  she  had  brought  home 
that  day,  had  threatened  him  with  a  revolver  instead.  He 
had  shot  her,  under  the  belief  that  she  had  been  upon  the 
point  of  killing  him.  He  was  willing,  he  said,  to  tell  all  he 
knew  about  Bertsch  and  the  other  members  of  the  conspiracy 
— he  conveyed  the  impression  that  he  knew  an  appalling  lot — 


THE    WHITE    ARC  415 

in  consideration  of  leniency  being  exercised  in  his  behalf.  He 
did  not  ask  complete  immunity.  Indeed,  in  his  shattered  con 
dition,  that  morning,  incarceration — safe  incarceration — for 
the  duration  of  the  war,  looked  better  to  him  than  a  preca 
rious  liberty. 

It  was  Eodne/s  suggestion  that  he  be  permitted  to  plead 
guilty  to  an  indictment  for  manslaughter,  and  the  state's  at 
torney,  sighing  over  the  lost  opportunities  offered  by  a  high 
society  murder  trial,  finally  consented. 

Thus  it  came  about  that  by  the  day  set  for  the  funeral,  all 
danger  of  the  outbreak  of  the  uglier  scandal — the  really  in 
delible  disgrace  which  had  seemed  inevitable  for  an  hour  or 
two  that  Friday  night — was  definitely  passed. 

There  was,  of  course,  a  lot  of  excitement ;  there  were  news 
paper  head-lines  that  bruised  like  blows.  There  was  a  high- 
voltage  crackle  of  speculation.  Constance  and  Eileen  were 
often  aware,  when  they  came  into  a  company  of  their  friends, 
that  the  current  of  conversation  had  been  abruptly  switched 
to  another  circuit.  But  all  this,  compared  to  what  might 
have  been,  seemed  like  the  result  of  a  heavenly  intervention  in 
their  favor.  Indeed,  it  was  known  in  the  family  that  Eileen 
seriously  regarded  it  like  that. 

Discussion  simmered  down  to  two  alternatives:  one  that 
Helena,  in  a  fanatical  devotion  to  her  pacifist  and  anti- 
nationalist  principles  had  been  prepared  to  betray  the  secrets 
of  her  husband's  laboratory  (or  to  connive  at  the  destruction 
of  the  plant  at  Eiverdale)  but  had  experienced  at  the  last 
moment  a  change  of  heart  which  had  cost  her  her  life;  the 
other  that  she  had  never  meant  anything  of  the  sort,  but  had 
merely  led  the  plotters  on  in  order  to  learn — and  the  better 
frustrate — their  plans. 

It  was  this  latter — the  sentimental-heroic  version — that 
finally  gained  almost  universal  acceptance.  An  ironic  foot 
note  it  makes  to  Helena's  stormy  life.  One  hates  to  imagine 
her  poor  ineffectual  ghost  becoming  aware  of  that  gossip — 
learning  how  that  last  week  of  hers  on  earth  had  come  to  be 
regarded. 


CHAPTER  XXXIII 

YOU  know  the  Corbett  family  well  enough  by  this  time, 
I  think,  to  understand  how  this  unexpected  denouement 
of  the  tragedy  affected  them.  They  would  have  faced 
disgrace  for  Hugh,  would  have  fought  for  and  beside  him  back 
to  the  last  ditch.  They  would  have  sympathized  with  him 
in  his  misfortunes,  in  any  misfortunes,  that  is  to  say,  that  they 
could  interpret  even  dimly  in  that  light. 

But  they  were  a  realistic  lot,  and  they  enveloped  Helena's 
death  in  no  romantic  or  sentimental  atmosphere  whatever. 
None  of  them  had  ever  liked  her.  The  nearest  tiling  to  it 
in  the  family  had  been  Robert,  Senior's,  touch  of  gallant  ad 
miration.  They  regarded  it  as  an  unqualified  misfortune  to 
Hugh  that  he  had  ever  seen  her,  and  her  taking  off,  by  that 
same  token,  as  a  piece  of  plain  good  luck  for  her  husband. 
What  was  more,  they  felt  pretty  sure  that  Hugh  himself 
hadn't  cared  much  for  her  after  he  was  fairly  over  his  first 
infatuation,  and  that  he  had,  in  words  of  one  syllable,  been 
making  the  best  of  a  bad  job. 

Even  their  heavy-handedness  would  hardly  have  gone  the 
length  of  open  congratulation,  nor  would  they  have  expected 
him  to  avow  the  sentiment  which,  as  a  matter  of  plain  com 
mon  sense,  they  felt  he  ought  to  feel.  There  were  certain 
minimum  decencies  even  among  their  outspoken  selves,  which 
they  expected  to  maintain.  But  Hugh's  conduct,  during  the 
fortnight  that  followed  the  funeral,  became,  as  the  days  went 
by,  an  irritating  enigma,  a  thing  they  observed  with  what 
patience  they  could  command,  incredulously.  This  state  of 
mind  was  most  marked  in  his  mother;  just  as  it  was  least  so, 
or  absent  altogether,  in  Constance.  Consequently,  it  was  over 
Constance's  head  that  Mrs.  Corbett's  slowly  accumulated 
high  tensity  of  exasperation  finally  burst. 

When  one  considers  the  facts,  it  isn't  very  hard  to  under- 

416 


THE   WHITE    ARC 

stand  how  she  felt.  Gregory's  telegram,  containing  little  more 
than  the  bare  announcement  that  Helena  had  been  murdered, 
had  reached  her  and  her  husband  in  San  Francisco  before  they 
had  fairly  got  the  alkali  dust  from  their  journey  west  out 
of  their  lungs.  Its  guarded  phraseology  made  it  horribly 
alarming. 

She  lived  through  three  absolutely  ghastly  days  on  the  way 
back  with  her  husband,  and  from  Cheyenne  on,  with  Bob,  who 
deepened  the  gloom  rather  than  lightened  it  by  treating  their 
unspeakable  surmise  with  a  gloomy  certainty.  Of  course, 
Hugh  had  killed  his  wife.  Bob  had  felt  quite  sure  all  along 
it  would  only  be  a  question  of  time  before  he  did. 

It  was,  of  course,  in  the  highest  degree  exasperating — in 
her  relief  from  three  days  like  that — to  find  Hugh  as  gloomy 
as  he  might  have  been  expected  to  be,  if  everything  had  turned 
out  as  badly  as  possible,  instead  of  incredibly  well.  She 
stayed  bottled  up  for  three  or  four  days  after  the  funeral, 
and  then  one  morning  she  burst,  as  I  said,  all  over  Constance. 
It  was  a  morning,  too,  that  Constance  had  laboriously  swept 
clear  for  dealing  with  large  arrears  in  the  way  of  letters. 

Mrs.  Corbett  came  in,  very  warm  and  rumpled  and  out  of 
breath,  stared  with  marked  disapprobation  at  the  bright  little 
wood  fire  Connie  had  been  luxuriating  in,  slammed  open  a 
window,  muttered  "You'd  have  suffocated  in  another  ten 
minutes !"  as  a  sort  of  defiant  apology  when  the  early  March 
wind  swept  a  handful  of  papers  off  her  daughter's  desk,  and 
dropped  panting  in  the  chintz-covered  wing  chair. 

"Of  course,  you  get  warm  when  you  hurry  like  that,"  Con 
stance  said.  "Mother,  I'll  have  to  put  it  down.  It's  blowing 
all  the  smoke  out  of  the  chimney.  Let  me  get  you  a  drink 
of  water." 

"Gin  and  water,"  growled  Mrs.  Corbett.  "Baw  gin.  That's 
what  I'd  like.  No,  of  course,  I  don't  want  any.  I've  been 
talking  to  that  brother  of  yours.  Another  ten  minutes,  and 
I'd  have  tried  to  shake  him.  That's  what  he  needs." 

There  were  three  of  Constance's  brothers  she  might  have 
been  talking  to  that  morning,  but  Constance  had  no  need  of 
asking  her  which  one  she  meant. 


418  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

"I  should  think  he  had  been  shaken  enough  in  the  last  twf 
weeks/'  she  observed,  which  for  a  while  reduced  Mrs.  Cor- 
bett  to  inarticulate  mutterings. 

"I've  been  trying/'  she  said  at  last,  "to  get  a  little  bit  of 
common  sense  into  him.  I  wanted  him  to  leave  that  horrible 
house  of  his  and  come  back  to  us,  his  old  room,  things  as 
they  were.  Bob's  going  to  say  around  for  a  while,  and  Anne 
talks  of  coming.  We'd  be  a  family  again,  like  old  times.  The 
best  thing  in  the  world  for  him.  Only  he  wouldn't  hear  of  it. 

"It  was  on  my  tongue  to  tell  him,"  she  went  on  finally, 
"that  if  he  meant  to  go  on  like  this,  I  didn't  want  him  to 
come.  I  can't  bear  the  sight  of  a  sick  cat,  and  that's  what 
he's  acting  like.  Oh,  I  didn't  say  that," — this  was  in  acknowl 
edgment  of  Constance's  look  of  horror.  "I  held  my  breath 
instead.  I  don't  like  to  cry  even  when  there  is  something 
to  cry  about.  My  nose  gets  red,  and  I  feel  like  a  fool.  I 
didn't  on  the  train,  not  a  drop,  all  those  three  days  while  I 
had  to  watch  your  father  turning  old  under  my  eyes,  thinking 
what  those  idiotic  telegrams  of  Greg's  made  us  think.  And 
then  we  got  home  to  find  that  what  had  really  happened  was 
the  best  piece  of  luck  Hugh's  had  since  the  day  he  first  saw 
the  woman !  You  can't  deny  that's  true,  and  neither  can  he. 
It  is  all  infernal  nonsense.  But  he  has  got  a  look  about 
him  .  .  ."  The  tears  came  again  just  at  the  memory  of 
it.  She  squeezed  them  bruskly  out  of  her  eyes  and  sur 
rendered. 

"What  is  the  matter  with  him,  Connie?"  she  demanded. 
"He's  like  a  man  hagridden.  Is  the  woman  haunting  him?" 
She  turned  suddenly  and  stared  at  her  daughter.  "I  have 
thought,  off  and  on,  that  you  knew  something  the  rest  of  us 
don't.  I  believe  you  do.  There  has  been  a  sort  of  look  about 
you,  too,  now  I  think  of  it." 

Constance  was  a  little  disconcerted  with  the  suddenness  of 
this  attack;  but  she  quickly  pulled  herself  together. 

"I  don't  think  I've  got  any  special  look,"  she  protested, 
turning  to  her  dressing-table  mirror,  as  if  for  confirmation. 
"Of  course,  I've  been  through  it  all  with  him  from  the  be 
ginning.  I  don't  think  you  would  find  it  so  hard  to  under- 


THE    WHITE    ARC  419 

stand  how  he  is  taking  it,  if  you'd  done  that.  He  was  all 
worn  out,  of  course,  when  it  happened.  He  hadn't  had  any 
regular  sleep  or  meals  for  a  week.  He  had  been  working 
so  crazily  hard." 

"Work!"  sniffed  his  mother.  "Work  never  hurts  a  Cor- 
bett."  She  turned,  once  more,  a  penetrating  thoughtful  look 
upon  her  daughter. 

Constance  hurried  on,  "And  what  I  think  makes  it  harder 
for  him  is  that  he  knows  it's  good  luck,  and  he  can't  be  sorry. 
That  would  be  positively  ghastly,  I  think,  to  have  people 
sympathizing  with  you  over  something  you  feel  like  a  criminal 
for  being  glad  about.  And  not  have  a  soul  anywhere  that 
you  could  tell  the  truth  to." 

Mrs.  Corbet t  scouted  this  theory  as  fine-spun  nonsense. 
"Why  can't  he  tell  the  truth  to  us?  We  know  it  already, 
don't  we?" 

In  the  next  breath  she  answered  her  own  question.  "No, 
we  don't.  That's  exactly  the  point  I  am  getting  at." 

Another  momentary  silence,  and  then  before  Constance 
could  summon  her  breath  to  protest,  she  pounced.  "Tell  me 
exactly  what  Jean's  got  to  do  with  this." 

At  that  Constance  slumped.  "If  you  know  she  has  got 
anything  to  do  with  it,  you  must  know  pretty  near  as  much 
as  I  do,"  she  said.  She  paused  there  a  moment  in  the  hope 
that  her  mother  would  go  on  to  reveal  the  sources  and  the 
extent  of  her  own  information.  But  Mrs.  Corbett  merely 
waited  grimly,  and  with  a  sigh  Constance  began  the  tale. 

"I  can  tell  you  all  I  had  anything  to  do  with,"  she  said. 
"I  had  talked  with  Jean  just  that  afternoon,  after  the  con 
cert,  so  I  knew  a  little  and  guessed  a  good  deal  of  how  things 
were  between  them.  When  Greg  telephoned  for  Frank  and 
me  to  come  right  over  to  Hugh's  house  because  they'd  just 
found  Helena  there  dead,  I  waited  long  enough  to  call  up 
Jean  and  tell  her.  I  couldn't  bear  the  thought  of  her  seeing 
the  morning  papers,  unprepared.  And,  of  course,  we  didn't 
know  then  what  the  papers  would  say.  What  they  mightn't 
say.  As  soon  as  I  got  a  good  chance  with  Hugh  I  told  him 
I  had  done  it.  He  seemed  relieved  then.  But  by  the  middle 


420  AN   AMETUOAN    FAMILY 

of  the  next  morning,  when  lie  hadn't  heard  anything  from 
her,  he  was  tcrrihly  restless — frantic  nearly. 

"So  I  offered  to  go  and  see  her.  And  I  did.  Drove  straight 
over  about  ten  o'clock.  It  was  a  shock  to  me  to  see  how  she 
had  taken  it.  I  had  been  with  her  just  the  day  before,  you 
see,  and  had  been,  well,  fairly  carried  of!  my  feet  by  her 
courage.  She  is  the  bravest  little  thing,  always.  And  that 
day  there  was  a  perfectly  terrifying  prospect  ahead  of  her; 
not  knowing  what  despicable  thing  Helena  might  have  planned 
to  do.  Or  might  already  have  done.  She  never  even  wavered. 
She  was  ready  for  anything.  Beady  to  see  anything  through. 
Heady  to  go  through  fire  or  over  hot  ploughshares.  It  simply 
took  my  breath.  I  didn't  know  whether  it  was  right  or  wrong ; 
but  for  the  time,  I  didn't  care.  It  was  so  splendidly  beautiful. 

"But  that  next  morning,  when  I  saw  her,  she  had  com 
pletely  gone  to  pieces.  It  was  just  a  panic.  I  couldn't  under 
stand  it  at  all  then.  I  don't  very  clearly  now,  because,  of  course, 
as  far  as  practical  results  are  concerned,  Helena's  death  makes 
everything  come  right.  But  at  the  time,  it  seemed  just  to 
have  annihilated  her. 

"The  thing  she  seemed  most  terrified  about  was  that  Hugh 
might  come  to  see  her.  It  seems  she  had  made  him  promise 
he  would,  the  night  before,  over  the  telephone.  He  had  called 
her  up  from  the  laboratory,  just  after  she  left  me.  She  wanted 
me  to  make  him  promise  not  to  come.  I  tried  to  quiet  her. 
I  thought  perhaps  she  had  a  wild  idea  that  Hugh  had  killed 
Helena  himself.  But  it  wasn't  that.  And  there  didn't  seem  to 
be  anything  else  to  say. 

"She  did  manage  to  pull  herself  together,  a  little,  just  as 
I  was  going,  and  gave  me  a  message  for  him.  I  was  to  tell 
him  that  she  wouldn't  go  awa}7,  if  he  wanted  her  not  to. 

"Well,  that  was  what  I  had  to  go  back  with  to  Hugh.  I 
tried  to  soften  it  down,  of  course;  made  as  little  as  I  could 
of  her  not  wanting  to  see  him,  and  as  much  of  her  being 
willing  to  stay,  in  case  he  didn't  want  her  to  go  south  with 
Ethel  and  Mother  Crawford.  But  it  didn't  do  any  good. 

"He  saw  it  all  just  as  if  he  had  been  there.  He  wasn't 
angry,  or  hurt,  or  even  surprised.  I  was  all  three,  of  course; 


THE    AVH1TE    ARC 

angry  a  little  and  surprised  a  lot.  And  he  explained  it  to  me 
with  that  same  look  on  his  face  that  he  has  had  ever  since. 
She  came  to  the  funeral  but  didn't  see  him.  It  was  the  next 
day,  of  course,  that  they  started  for  San  Antonio.  I'm  not 
sure  she  didn't  send  him  some  sort  of  word;  but  I  don't  be 
lieve  she  did." 

Down  in  her  heart,  Mrs.  CorBett  was  as  fond  of  Jean  as 
any  of  them — had  been  ever  since  the  days  of  Anne's  wed 
ding.  Against  the  mere  breath  of  hostile  criticism  she  would 
have  defended  the  girl  as  hotly  as  Constance  herself;  but  the 
rather  doting  affection  that  all  the  rest  of  her  family  lavished 
on  Jean  made  the  expression  of  her  own  seem  superfluous, 
and  her  favorite  attitude  had  always  been  a  grumbling  humor 
ous  dissent  from  the  extravagances  of  the  others.  Now,  in 
a  moment  of  genuine  indignation,  the  knowledge  that  any 
thing  she  said  about  the  girl  would  be  subject  to  a  heavy 
discount,  drove  her  farther  than  she  would  otherwise  have 
gone. 

"I  have  been  a  fool,"  she  burst  out.  "We've  all  been  fools 
not  to  see  that  there  was  something  behind  those  innocent 
ways  of  hers.  She  has  been  making  love  to  him,  I  suppose, 
ever  since  she  came  back  from  England.  But  this  that  you 
have  just  told  me,  is  the  first  I  have  known  of  it.  Hugh 
hasn't  said  anything  to  me.  That  was  just  a  guess  of  mine. 
I  thought  there  might  be  something  like  that.  She  ought  to 
be  whipped !  Oh,  the  way  she's  taking  on  now  doesn't  need 
any  explaining!  I  can  understand  it  well  enough.  Very 
romantic  it  was,  of  course,  as  long  as  it  was  only  a  question 
of  notes  and  kisses, — understanding  him  so  much  better  than 
his  wife  did,  and  all  that!  But  now  that  it  has  come  down 
to  the  question  of  common  every-day  marriage,  it  isn't  so  nice. 
Though  'she  won't  run  away,  if  he  wants  her  not  to' !  Bah !" 

It  was  not  often  that  any  one  attempted  to  check  this  for 
midable  lady  in  full  career.  About  the  only  person  who  had 
ever  tried  it  was  Hugh.  But  Constance,  though  she  trembled, 
did  it  now. 

"Mother,"  she  said,  "you  shan't  talk  about  Jean  like  thatf 
'Not  to  me !" 


422  AST   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

"What !"  boomed  the  old  woman.  "I'll  talk  about'  her  as 
I  please.  To  anybody." 

"You  won't/'  said  Constance,  "because  you  know  it's  not 
fair." 

A  realization  on  Mrs.  Corbett's  part  that  this  charge  was 
entirely  true  added  itself  to  her  astonishment  over  her  daugh 
ter's  defiance.  She  subsided,  muttering,  and  gave  Constance 
a  chance  to  go  on. 

"I  think,"  Constance  said,  a  word  at  a  time,  "that  Jean  is 
about  the  finest,  bravest,  straightest  person  I  know.  Most  of 
us  are  cowards  beside  her.  I  am,  anyway.  She's  always  loved 
Hugh,  of  course;  and  she's  been  the  only  one  of  all  of  us, 
lately,  who  has  loved  him — in  a  way  that  did  him  any  good,  I 
mean.  The  rest  of  us  hare  sat  around  talking  about  poor  old 
Hugh  and  saying  what  a  pity  it  was  that  his  life  should  have 
been  spoiled  by  that  dreadful  marriage  of  his.  But  she 
loved  him  well  enough  to  like  Helena,  too,  as  long  as  she 
thought  he  did.  And  she  helped  him.  Made  him  happier 
than  he's  been  before — ever,  I  guess.  And  she'd  have  done 
anything,  I  believe,  that  she  thought  would  make  him  happier. 
Even  then;  though  she  didn't  know  they  were — lovers. 

"She  didn't  find  that  out  until  a  little  while  ago — on 
Philip's  birthday,  that  was;  up  at  our  house  at  Lake  Forest. 
I  don't  know  how  it  happened.  It  just — flamed  up,  I  suppose. 
She  came  back  from  there  the  next  day  ready,  I'm  sure,  to 
do  anything  he  wanted  her  to.  Oh,  she  didn't  tell  me  much, 
but  I  knew  before  she'd  told  me  anything.  It  was  just  there 
in  her  face,  for  anybody  to  see  that  wanted  to  look.  Rose 
Aldrich  did  see  it ;  spoke  to  me  about  it." 

Mrs.  Corbett  had  listened  to  this  protest  with  no  more  in 
terruptions  than  an  occasional  incredulous  snort  or  two;  but 
at  this  point  she  propounded  a  question. 

"All  right ;  be  as  sentimental  about  it  as  you  like.  But  how 
do  you  account  for  the  way  she  has  acted  since?  How  docs 
Hugh  account  for  it  ?"  She  sat  back  more  comfortably  in  her 
big  chair,  crossed  her  legs  comprehensively,  lighted  one  of 
her  abominable  cigarettes — good  signs  of  her  recovery  of  her 
normal  frame  of  mind,  these  were — and  settled  back  to  listen. 


THE    WHITE    AKC  <!?7> 

"It  isn't  easy  to  make  it  sound  sensible,"  Constance  ad 
mitted.  "But  I  think  I  can  see  how  she  felt.  It  was  wrong— 
I  mean  it  was  what  everybody  would  call  wrong — for  her  and 
Hugh  to  love  each  other.  But  she  was  ready  to  make  any 
sacrifice  that  it  cost ;  ready  to  go  through  and  pay  the  price  of 
it,  if  Hugh  wanted  her  to.  And  then  all  at  once  what  would 
have  been  such  a  desperate  thing  for  them  to  do,  such  a 
hideously  costly  thing,  was  made  perfectly  safe  and  respectable 
because  Helena,  with  a  horrible  sort  of  difference,  did  it  first. 
Helena  had  a  lover  just  as  Jean  did.  But  Helena's  lover 
killed  her,  and  that  was  what  made  Jean  safe  with  hers.  And 
it  made  her  love  for  Hugh  seem  as  horrible  as  Helena's.  As 
if  it  might,  except  for  luck,  have  happened  the  other  way.  Oh, 
you  can't  talk  about  it.  If  you  don't  see  it,  you  don't.  But 
Jean  did,  and  Hugh  did,  too.  And  he  made  me  see  it,  partly 
anyhow." 

Mrs.  Corbett,  after  a  profane  and  purely  rhetorical  demand 
to  be  told  what  the  world  was  coming  to,  subsided  into  a 
thoughtful  silence.  Constance,  her  eyes  bright  with  tears, 
which  she  didn't  brush  away,  sat  staring  at  the  blaze  in  the 
open  grate. 

"I  wish  I  knew,"  she  said  at  last,  "whether  I  have  got  or 
ever  did  have  courage  enough  to  throw  away  all  the  small 
things  for  the  one  big  one.  Whether  I'd  ever  have  married 
Frank  no  matter  how  much  I  loved  him,  if  it  hadn't  happened 
to  be  a  perfectly  sensible,  correct  thing  to  do." 

"You  can  thank  your  stars  you  don't/'  her  mother  said 
gruffly,  with  the  long  exhalation  of  pungent  smoke.  "The 
girl's  mother  knows.  What  she  had  to  do  didn't  involve  any 
thing  disreputable,  to  be  sure.  But  it  cost  her  almost  as 
much.  And  look  at  her  now.  Worn  away  to  a  wisp !  You 
wouldn't  change  places  with  her?" 

"Xo,"  Constance  admitted  with  a  sigh.    "I  suppose  not." 

"Well,  there  we  are,"  said  Mrs.  Corbett.  "If  you're  right 
about  Hugh,  and  if  all  that  ails  him  is  that  Jean  has  gone 
away  without  saying  good-by  to  him,  why  it  will  all  come  right 
in  time,  I  suppose.  She'll  get  over  her  flutters,  he'll  get  over 
his  mopes,  and  they'll  patch  it  up  and  think  they're  the  hap- 


424  'AK   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

piest  pair  in  the  world.  But,  Connie,  I  don't  believe  you're 
right  ahout  it.  I  believe  there  is  something  else.  I  don't 
believe  a  man  over  thirty  could  look  like  that  over  anything 
a  snip  of  a-  girl  might  have  done  to  him.  That  explanation 
will  comfort  your  father,  though,  and  he  needs  comfort  badly 
enough,  God  knows.  And  it  may  satisfy  Greg." 

She  had  begun  to  move,  ponderously,  toward  getting  to  her 
feet,  but  with  this  mention  o!  her  eldest  son  she  sank  back  into 
her  chair  again.  "Greg's  worse  than  I  am,  you  know,"  she 
said.  "He's  simply  got  Hugh  on  the  brain.  Calls  me  up  from 
the  office  two  or  three  times  a  day.  He  wants  your  father 
and  me  to  take  him  somewhere;  which  we'd  do  in  a  minute, 
of  course,  if  he'd  go.  But  he  won't.  But  Greg  thinks  that 
anything  may  happen  if  we  let  him  go  on  like  this ;  thinks  he 
may  go  clean  off  his  head.  Or  do  something — desperate." 

"Do  you  suppose  Greg  knows  anything  that  we  don't?" 
Constance  asked. 

"Oh,  he  had  a  talk  with  Hugh;  r.  'sensible'  talk.  The  day 
before  the  funeral.  He's  told  me  all  about  it.  It  seems 
Hugh's  made  some  sort  of  discovery  out  there  at  his  labora 
tory.  .  ." 

"  'Corbettite/  •"  said  Constance.  "I  know  about  that.  That's 
what  he  was  working  on,  that  last  week.  Doesn't  Greg  be 
lieve  it  is  a  discovery  ?" 

"Why,  as  a  scientific  thing — yes,"  Mrs.  Corbett  said.  "Greg 
thinks  it  may  make  him  famous,  fifty  years  from  now ;  among 
scientific  men,  anyway.  But  Hugh  has  an  idea  it  can  be  used 
now.  In  the  war.  For  airplane  engines.  He  wanted  to  turn 
it  over  to  Greg,  for  him  to  make  an  enormous  lot  of,  out  at 
Riverdale,  and  he  took  it  hard  when  Greg  refused  to  consider 
it." 

"Why  did  he  refuse?"  Constance  demanded,  aroused  at 
once,  as  always  she  so  easily  was,  on  Hugh's  behalf. 

Her  mother  nodded.  "I  took  it  that  way,  too;  abused  Greg 
like  a  pick-pocket  for  ten  minutes  without  waiting  to  hear 
any  more.  I  wouldn't  like  to  be  a  Prodigal  Son's  elder  brother, 
for  a  fact.  He  took  it  so  patiently  he  made  me  ashamed  of 
myself.  He  was  all  broken  up  over  the  way  Hugh  had  felt 


THE   WHITE   AfiC  425 

about  it.  But  he  assured  me,  seriously,  that  as  a  manufac 
turing  proposition,  a  scheme  for  bottling  lightning-bugs  would 
have  been  just  as  practicable.  Hugh's  never  made  more  than 
a  pound  or  two  of  the  stuff  at  a  time,  he  says.  Doesn't  even 
know  that  it  can  be  made  in  quantities.  Hasn't  any  idea  how 
much  it  would  cost,  if  he  could.  He  admits  that  he  could 
have  bought  gold  cheaper,  pound  for  pound,  than  the  samples 
he  has  made  have  cost  him. 

"Oh,  that  doesn't  mean  anything!"  she  exclaimed  when 
Constance  looked  aghast  at  that.  "Only  that  experiments  of 
that  sort  always  cost  like  the  devil.  But  that's  another  thing, 
of  course.  Corbett  &  Company  are  going  to  be  hard  up  for 
a  while,  Greg  says.  Until  he  knows  how  this  tractor  business 
is  coming  out.  He's  making  a  great  big  investment  in  that 
and  doesn't  feel  at  all  sure  that  he'll  get  any  of  it  back.  He 
talks  about  passing  the  next  dividend  just  as  a  matter  of  pre 
caution. 

"And  then,  on  top  of  that,  comes  Hugh  with  a  thing  Greg 
says  you  might  easily  spend  half  a  million  dollars  on  before 
you  knew  for  sure  that  you  really  had  something  valuable,  and 
another  half  million  after  that,  making  people  believe  that 
you  had." 

Constance's  eyes  filled  up  again,  at  that.  "Poor  old  Hugh," 
she  said. 

"You  can't  deny  it  was  sensible,"  Mrs.  Corbett  remarked, 
as  she  lighted  a  match  for  a  fresh  cigarette,  but  she  paused  in 
the  act  of  applying  it,  to  add  in  a  ferocious  whisper,  "Too 
damned  sensible!"  and  let  the  flame  reach  her  fingers  un 
heeded. 

"What  worried  Greg  most,"  she  went  on,  after  this  error 
had  been  duly  recognized  and  corrected,  "was  that  Hugh 
was  so  meek  about  it.  Made  no  row  at  all ;  didn't  even  argue. 
Just  said,  after  a  while,  that  he  saw  Greg  was  right  about  it, 
and  went  out. — Well,  he  was,"  she  concluded  furiously,  "and 
I  told  him  so." 

She  had  announced  her  intention  of  going  home  and  she 
allowed  herself  to  be  helped  into  her  coat,  when  she  turned 
on  her  daughter  with  another  question. 


426  AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 

"Connie,  can  you  pray?  Really,  I  mean.  With  a  belief 
that  your  prayers  were  going  anywhere  ?  I  haven't — like  that — 
in  years.  But  I'll  have  to,  pretty  soon,  unless  this  Verdun 
thing  stops.  And  something  happens  to  Hugh.  He's  one  and 
they're  millions.  Great  God,  what  a  world !" 


CHAPTEE  XXXIV 

SOMETHING  did  happen — not  precisely  to  Hugh  though 
the  effect  of  it  got  round  to  him  in  time — within  a  week 
of  the  talk  between  Mrs.  Corbett  and  Constance. 

It  was  an  episode  which  will  come  to  be  regarded,  I  venture 
to  guess,  as  one  of  the  curiosities  of  history,  when  Time  has 
given  us  a  perspective  upon  it  and  its  results ;  so  mad  it  was 
in  its  inception  yet  so  successful,  so  trivial  yet,  considering  the 
detonation  it  produced,  so  capitally  important — namely,  the 
bandit  Villa's  projected  conquest  of  the  United  States,  his  in 
vasion  of  the  State  of  New  Mexico,  his  sack  of  the  town  of 
Columbus,  his  unhampered  retreat,  his  immunity  from  retri 
bution. 

Looked  back  upon  from  a  day  a  little  more  than  two  years 
later  when  I  write  these  lines ;  from  a  day  when  we  are  buying 
each  fresh  edition  of  papers  to  learn  whether  the  thin  line  of 
English  in  Flanders  still  holds  or  whether  the  German  tor 
rent  is  breaking  through  upon  the  Channel  ports,  from  a  day 
when  our  ships,  their  decks  packed  with  troops  so  that  they 
look  like  a  covering  of  khaki-colored  moss,  are  putting  out  to 
sea  in  a  frantic  urgency  of  haste  lest  our  tardy  reenforcements 
arrive,  after  all,  too  late ;  looked  back  upon  from  to-day,  that 
raid  of  Pancho  Villa's  seems  as  remote,  as  completely  the 
affair  of  another  epoch,  as  Dewey's  battle  in  Manila  Bay. 

Yet  it  is  my  belief  that  History — if  there  are  to  be  any 
more  histories — will  attribute  to  it  a  greater  causative  im 
portance  than  the  sinking  of  the  Lusitania.  This  was  too 
much,  we  said.  Our  patience  had  been  tried  too  far.  Let 
this  murderous  bully  be  caught  and  punished,  without  more 
ado.  And  then,  blankly,  we  began  to  realize  that  even  this 
petty  piece  of  retributive  justice  was  beyond  our  immediate 
military  resources  to  accomplish.  Days  passed  and  more  days 

42? 


AN   AMERICAN   FAMILY 


and  still  the  punitive  expedition  did  not  start.  The  army  had 
no  supply  trains,  no  airplanes  that  would  fly,  no  machine 
guns  worth  mentioning.  There  were  a  thousand  deficiencies 
of  materiel,  but  greater  than  these  was  the  deficiency  in  men. 
It  was  only  by  stripping  the  border,  already  too  lightly 
guarded,  that  a  mobile  force  of  the  few  thousands  needed  could 
be  scraped  together.  And  when,  finally,  it  was  possible  for 
them  to  move,  they  were  obliged  to  move  not  so  much  in 
pursuit  of  Villa,  as,  with  infinite  circumspection,  where  and 
how  they  could  without  giving  offense  to  Carranza,  who  had 
proscribed  the  use  of  railways  and  the  passage  through  towns 
or  cities.  The  thing  was  an  appalling  farce,  yet  it  was  deadly 
serious.  If  we  offended  Carranza,  Mexico  would  make  war 
on  us.  And  Mexico,  bankrupt,  comic-opera  Mexico,  if  one 
reckoned  by  immediate  resources  in  men  and  guns,  was  more 
than  a  match  for  us  ! 

It  became  apparent  almost  at  once  that  the  National  Guard 
would  have  to  be  called  out  in  order  to  turn  the  trick  at  all, 
and  it  was  at  this  point  that  the  thing  came  home  personally 
to  the  Corbett  family. 

Frank  Crawford  was  a  graduate  of  West  Point.  It  had 
been  with  real  reluctance  that  he  left  the  army  to  take  charge 
of  his  mother's  affairs  and  after  he  had  fairly  settled  himself 
in  business  harness,  he  went  into  a  cavalry  regiment  in  the 
National  Guard.  It  had  become  a  hobby  with  him;  a  sad 
sort  of  hobby,  Constance  used  to  say  regretfully,  for  he  gave 
his  precious  time  ungrudgingly,  yet  never  with  any  very  con 
fident  hope  that  it  was  well  spent.  As  a  real  soldier  lie  had 
kept  abreast,  as  well  as  he  could,  of  military  science,  and  he 
was  under  no  roseate  illusions  about  the  Guard.  His  colonel 
detested  him  for  a  killjoy. 

This  colonel,  it  may  be  noted,  was  a  genial  soul,  proprietor 
of  a  widely  ramified  coal  business,  and  a  republican  commit- 
teeman  ;  a  genuine  patriot  according  to  his  lights,  an  excellent 
man  to  put  down  for  a  speech  when  there  was  nothing  par 
ticular  to  be  said.  He  possessed,  in  short,  all  the  qualifications 
for  colonel  of  a  regiment  except  that  of  being  a  soldier.  He 
honestly  believed,  with  his  whole  soul  —  I  say  nothing  about 


THE    WHITE   ARC  429 

his  mind — that  his  regiment  was  one  of  the  finest  and  most 
formidable  military  organizations,  for  its  size,  in  the  world. 
Frank  Crawford's  perpetual  faultfinding  struck  him  as  not 
quite  treasonable  perhaps  but  a  bad  thing  for  morale.  (This 
was  a  word  he  had  picked  up  in  the  last  year  or  two,  and  used 
indiscriminately.)  A  knowledge  that  he  couldn't  get  on  with 
out  the  only  trained  officer  in  his  organization,  combined  with 
a  natural  but  unadmitted  awe  for  Frank's  social  and  financial 
importance,  was  all  that  kept  his  irritation  within  any  sort  of 
bounds. 

"We're  going  to  be  called  out,"  Frank  teld  Constance, 
after  a  glance  at  the  head-lines  of  his  newspaper  one  morning, 
three  or  four  days  after  the  raid.  "That's  as  sure  as  God 
made  little  apples.  Smedley  telegraphed  the  adjutant-gen 
eral  yesterday,  that  we  were  ready  to  start  on  twenty-four 
hours'  notice.  We're  only  seventy-five  per  cent,  up  to  peace 
strength,  of  course,  and  nowhere  near  half  equipped;  but  at 
that,  we're  better  than  most  Guard  organizations.  It  may  be 
a  few  weeks  or  a  month  or  two;  but  it  will  come,  and  Lord 
what  a  show  we'll  make  of  ourselves !  However,  it  will  be  a 
good  thing  for  us — a  little  real  fighting/' 

His  wife  stared  at  him.  "You  mean  you  will  go?"  she 
asked  incredulously,  and  with  that  he  stared  back  at  her. 

"Of  course,"  he  said. 

"Yes — of  course,"  she  acquiesced,  rather  limply,  after  a  mo 
ment  of  silence.  "Only  it  seems  so  impossible  somehdw — for 
you." 

It  took  her  two  or  three  days  to  digest  the  idea  at  all.  It 
seemed  the  stuff  of  nightmares  rather  than  of  logical  day 
light  reality,  that  Frank  should  actually  be  contemplating 
leaving  his  bank,  his  office,  his  clubs,  his  prosperous  safe  af 
fairs,  his  expeditions  with  the  children,  his  daily  intimate  life 
with  her,  to  go  away  in  a  uniform  to  fight,  die  perhaps, 
somewhere  in  Mexico.  It  couldn't — a  prospect  like  that — it 
simply  couldn't  be  true. 

Since  August,  1914,  the  great  fact  of  war,  the  monstrous 
thing  that  was  happening  there  in  the  fields  of  France  had 
never  been  wholly  out  of  her  mind.  The  news  of  it,  which  she 


430  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

read  daily  in  the  papers,  colored  her  days  as  it  was  bad  or 
good.  Activities  connected  with  the  relief  of  conditions  it 
created  had  filled  up  what  once  had  been  her  spare  time.  If 
any  one  had  told  her  she  didn't  realize  there  was  a  war  going 
on,  she  would  have  replied  indignantly  that  she  did.  Her 
sister-in-law  was  an  English  woman  whose  husband  and  two 
sons  were  at  the  front,  and  she  had  now  a  brother  there  of  her 
own.  Her  mother  was  watching  the  mails  for  Carter's  first  let 
ter.  And  yet,  it  was  the  simple  truth  that  what  war  really 
meant  never  came  home  to  her  until  her  husband,  her  very  own 
Frank,  the  children's  father,  said  across  the  breakfast  table  that 
of  course  he  would  go  when  the  regiment  did,  and  that  the 
regiment's  departure  was,  in  his  opinion,  only  a  matter  of 
weeks. 

She  was  still  feeling  a  little  dazed  over  it  one  afternoon 
when  her  brother  Bob  dropped  in  ostensibly  to  see  if  Frank 
had  a  copy  of  the  Plattslurgh  Manual  that  he  could  borrow. 

"I  enlisted  in  the  Battery  last  night,"  he  told  her,  when  she 
produced  the  volume.  "I  think  that's  as  good  a  chance  of 
getting  in  as  there  is.  They  say  it's  a  sure  thing  they'll  go." 

The  organization  Bob  referred  to,  was  a  battery  in  the 
state's  only  artillery  regiment,  whose  alphabetical  designation 
had  the  same  sort  of  distinction,  background,  atmosphere  that 
"Fifth"  has  among  the  ordinals  which  designate  New  York's 
avenues.  The  cavalry  would  have  been  Bob's  more  natural 
choice,  perhaps;  but  that  branch  contained  no  such  corps 
d'elite  as  this  battery. 

It  was  when  she  heard  this  announcement  of  Bob's  that 
Constance  got  her  first  thrill  of  pride  out  of  Frank's  decision 
to  gx>.  She  was  glad  not  to  have  to  explain  why  he  was  not 
going.  She  discovered  she  was  proud  of  Bob  too.  She  had  al 
ways  loved  him,  of  course,  in  a  sisterly  way.  Not  as  she 
loved  Hugh,  nor,  not  quite,  as  she  loved  Gregory  and  Carter. 
Love  is  not,  perhaps,  just  the  best  word  for  that  sense  of  an 
indissoluble  bond,  for  it  can  exist  quite  apart  from  any  affec 
tionate  companionship;  but  it  generally  goes,  unscrutinized, 
by  that  name.  Now,  though,  as  she  looked  at  him,  a  gush 


THE    WHITE    AKC  431 

of  unwonted  warm  affection  came  up  for  him  in  her  heart. 
She  dropped  down  on  the  arm  of  his  chair,  and  took  hold  of 
one  of  his  hands. 

"I'm  glad  you're  going,"  she  said.  "In  a  way  I'm  glad 
Frank  is,  only — .  Well,  I'm  glad  for  you,  and  for  her,  that 
there  isn't  a  girl  you're  leaving  behind ;  that  she  doesn't  exist, 
I  mean.  That's  sort  of  an  Irish  bull,  I  suppose,  but  you  know 
what  I  mean." 

"She  exists  all  right,"  Bob  said.  "That's  what  I  came 
around  to  tell  you.  It's  Olive  Heaton.  I  thought  perhaps 
you'd  have  guessed." 

To  the  Bob  she  had  always  known,  Constance  might  have 
observed  that  it  would  need  a  courageous  guesser  to  attribute 
any  significance  to  his  light-hearted  love  making;  but  this, 
somehow,  was  a  new  Bob,  and  she  didn't  say  it. 

"I  asked  her  yesterday  afternoon,"  he  went  on,  "before  I 
enlisted.  She  says  it's  all  right,  and  that  she'll  marry  me 
before  we  go." 

This  announcement  of  Bob's  was  quite  as  much  of  a  bomb 
for  the  rest  of  the  family  as  for  Constance,  since  she  merely 
partook  of  the  general  skepticism  concerning  the  chance  of 
his  falling  seriously  in  love  with  any  woman  it  was  possible 
for  him  to  marry.  His  choice  of  Olive  Heaton  was  a  weight 
off  their  minds,  for  she  was,  unmistakably  "their  sort"  of 
person;  a  real  person,  too,  though  often  cited  by  the  more 
conservative  of  mothers  as  a  horrible  example  of  what  we  were 
coming  to  in  these  degenerate  days.  The  fact  was  that  Olive 
had  never  got  on  especially  well  with  her  mother  and  after 
that  lady's  second  marriage  she  had  taken  an  apartment  and 
gone  to  live  by  herself,  a  course  which  her  ample  share  of  her 
father's  fortune  put  beyond  the  reach  of  effectual  resistance. 
It  was  what  came,  the  critics  said,  of  having  allowed  a  head 
strong  girl  her  own  way  in  everything  since  she  was  ten  years 
old,  the  pursuit  of  her  whims,  from  toe-dancing  to  the  breed 
ing  of  police  dogs,  the  extension  of  her  linguistic  gifts  to  an 
absolutely  immoral  familiarly  with  French  and  Italian.  Why 
the  girl  could  flirt  as  easily  with  an  opera  tenor  as  with  a 


432  AJSr   AME1UCAN    FAMILY 

college  boy !  And  she  was  still  a  mere  child,  in  years — twenty- 
three  or  so,  and  she  didn't  look  that — when  she  told  Bob  she 
would  marry  him. 

Mrs.  Corbett  had  always  been  her  strong  partisan,  having 
freely  expressed  the  opinion,  whenever  the  topic  was  broached 
in  her  presence,  that  the  girl's  mother  was  a  fool  and  that 
Olive  herself  would  have  been  one  to  stay  a  day  longer  than 
she  did  under  the  maternal — and  step-paternal — roof.  She 
was  openly  exultant  over  Bob's  news  and  went  to  see  her 
prospective  daughter-in-law  and  tell  her  so  the  day  she 
learned  it. 

"I  haven't  a  good  word  for  him,"  she  observed  candidly  to 
Olive.  "Not  that  that  needs  saying.  All  his  good  points  are 
there  for  anybody  to  see.  But  the  others  are,  too,  I  suppose. 
He's  a  handful  but  I've  no  doubt  you  know  it.  And  you've  got 
good  hands.  Your  eyes  are  open,  unless  they're  dazzled  by 
this  new  uniform  of  his."  She  turned  a  thoughtful  look  on 
the  girl,  who  met  it  candidly. 

"It  isn't  that,"  she  said.  "At  least,  it  would  come  to  the 
same  thing  without  it.  I  have  always  wanted  to  marry  Bob." 

Mrs.  Corbett  nodded  approvingly.  "Exactly  what  he  needs," 
she  said,  "is  a  wife  who  knows  what  she  wants. 

"We're  keeping  very  quiet,  of  course,"  she  added,  "on  ac 
count  of  Hugh;  but  you'll  come  around  to  a  family  dinner, 
won't  you,  in  a  night  or  two?  Dreadful  things  they  are  to 
be  sure;  but  it's  what  comes  with  marrying  into  a  big  family." 

Olive  replied  appropriately  that  she  loved  big  families. 
Whereupon  Mrs.  Corbett  sighed  voluminously. 

"Of  course,"  she  conceded,  "I  can't  say  I'm  sorry  I  had  six 
children,  because  then  you  could  ask  me  which  and  how  many 
of  my  six  should  never  have  been  born.  And  when  you  come 
down  to  it  that  way  why  there  aren't  any.  They  don't  go 
with  a  quiet  life,  though.  Out  of  so  many  you'll  always  have 
one  at  least  to  worry  about — little  or  big.  I  used  to  say  that 
when  the  last  of  them  was  twenty-one,  I'd  wash  my  hands  of 
them.  Good  lord,  I've  had  more  to  worry  about  since  they're 
grown,  than  ever  their  mumps  and  measles  gave  me." 

"I  hope  you  have  good  news  jfrom  Carter,"  Olive  said. 


THE    WHITE    AHC  433 

"A  cable  or  two/'  Mrs.  Corbett  told  ber.  "We  shall  be 
getting  a  letter  any  day  now.  Oh  yes,  Carter  is  the  natural 
one  to  worry  about.  He  will  be  at  one  of  their  schools  now, 
learning  to  fly.  But  if  he  falls  instead" — the  grim  lines  in 
her  face  deepened ;  but  her  voice  was  steady — "if  he  is  killed 
over  there,  he'll  die  happy,  knowing  he  has  done  his  thing. 
And  so  in  a  way,  there  is  nothing  for  me  to  worry  about. 
Because  there  is  nothing  for  me  to  do.  The  worrying  thing 
is  when  you  feel  there  must  be  something  that  you  could  do 
if  only  you  weren't  too  great  a  fool  to  see  it.  It's  Hugh  I'm 
worried  about  now." 

"Bob's  told  you  his  idea,  I  suppose  ?"  Olive  ventured. 

"Bob's  idea !*'  his  mother  echoed  astonished,  "I  didn't  know 
he  had  any." 

Olive  laughed.  This  was  going  to  be  a  mother-in-law  after 
her  own  heart. 

"Bob  thinks/'  she  said,  "that  the  thing  for  Hugh  is  to 
enlist  with  him.  He  says  the  trouble  with  Hugh  is  that  he 
has  always  had  too  many  ideas,  and  that  there's  nothing  like 
being  a  soldier,  for  getting  over  them/' 

"I'll  apologize  to  Bob  the  next  time  I  see  him,"  Mrs.  Cor 
bett  exclaimed.  "That's  the  first  sensible  suggestion  about 
Hugh  that  has  been  made  by  anybody.  Why  the  devil  didn't 
I  think  of  it!  Or  Greg!  Greg's  supposed  to  have  common 
sense.''  Then  with  a  keen  look  at  the  girl,  "'I'd  like  to 
know,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  whether  Bob  said  that  to  you,  or 
you  said  it  to  Bob.  Of  course,  I  never  shall.  Well,  you'll 
come  to  dinner?  Thursday  night?  We'll  all  be  there.  The 
whole  tribe  of  us.  Except,  possibly,  Hugh.  None  of  us  have 
seen  him  for  days,  and  I'm  not  sure  if  we  can  get  hold  of 
him." 

Hugh  didn't  come  to  the  dinner — not  at  least,  until  it  was 
over,  the  fact  being  that  during  the  excitement  over  Frank  and 
Bob  and  the  imminent  prospect  of  a  war  with  Mexico,  he  had 
quietly  slid  out  of  sight.  But  around  nine  o'clock,  when  the 
women  had  left  the  table,  a'nd  the  men,  Robert,  Senior,  that 
is  to  say,  Gregory,  Frank  and  Bob  were  getting  on  with  their 
cigars,  he  walked  into  the  dining-room  of  the  big  house, 


434  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

nodded  to  the  others,  and  with  a  thump  on  the  back  and  an 
excruciating  grip  of  the  hand,  congratulated  Bob. 

"I've  been  out  of  town/'  he  said.  "Didn't  get  back  until 
eight.  And  then  I  found  all  your  messages  at  the  laboratory. 
It's  great  stuff.  I'm  delighted  about  it.  Where's  Olive?  I 
want  to  wish  her  luck." 

"She's  somewhere  around  the  place,"  Bob  said.  "Only,  for 
heaven's  sake  don't  shake  hands  with  her  the  way  you  did 
with  me,  or  you'll  break  her  bones.  You're  looking  pretty  fit. 
Where've  you  been  ?" 

It  was  a  natural  question  to  ask,  for  the  change  in  his  ap 
pearance  was  simply  electrifying.  That  look  about  him, 
which  his  mother  had  described  as  hagridden,  was  gone.  In 
deed,  to  say  that  he  was  himself  again  hardly  does  justice  to 
the  change.  He  was  himself  only  lit  up  somehow  to  a  higher 
candle-power  than  usual. 

They  had  been  talking  about  him  only  a  little  while  before 
he  came  in,  and  the  great  idea — Olive's  idea  was  the  official 
designation  of  it,  though  she  persisted  in  her  attribution  of 
it  to  her  fiance* — had  been  thoroughly  canvassed  in  all  its 
bearings.  There  was  not  a  dissenting  voice.  They  all  agreed 
that  here  was  a  solution  to  Hugh's  problem.  So,  when  Greg 
ory  said  around  the  table  after  a  look  at  him,  "He's  gone  and 
done  it  for  himself,"  they  all  knew  what  he  meant.  And  all 
agreed  that  he  had  probably  hit  upon  the  explanation  of  the 
change  in  Hugh's  looks. 

"Yes,  I've  done  it  for  myself,"  Hugh  said,  pulling  up  a 
chair  and  reaching  for  a  cigarette,  "that  is,  I've  done  some 
thing.  What  is  it  that  I've  done?" 

"Enlisted?"  Frank  prompted.  "What  in?  The  cavalry,  I 
hope,  though  none  of  the  ordinary  runts  we  get  for  horses 
could  carry  you." 

"Well,  you're  right,  in  a  way,"  Hugh  said.  "I've  decided 
not  to  enlist;  but  it  comes  to  the  same  thing."  He  smiled 
thoughtfully  at  the  blank  look  he  saw  go  over  their  faces. 
"At  least,"  he  added,  "it's  up  to  Greg."  Then  he  turned  to 
his  elder  brother. 

"If  you'll  take  up  that  new  bearing  metal  of  mine,  manu- 


THE   WHITE   ARC  435 

factoe  and  market  it,  sell  it  for  the  purpose  it  is  needed  for, 
make  people  believe  in  it,  put  it  across,  then  I'll  enlist,  like 
a  shot.  I  can  give  you  a  bit  more  to  go  on,  in  the  way  of 
equipment,  costs  and  so  on,  than  I  could  when  we  talked  two 
weeks  ago.  But  I  don't  believe  you'll  do  it." 

Greg's  face  set.  "You  know  perfectly  well  why  I  won't  do 
it,"  he  said,  and  turned  to  his  father.  "I  haven't  a  word  to 
say  against  this  discovery  of  Hugh's  as  a  scientific  thing,"  he 
went  on.  "I  don't  pretend  to  understand  it.  If  Hugh  says 
he's  got  it,  he  has — as  a  scientific  discovery.  But  as  a  commer 
cial  proposition  it's  moonshine.  That's  what  I  honestly  think, 
and  I  can't  say  anything  else.  Of  course,  if  he  can  convince 
you,  and  you  two  outvote  me,  I'll  take  your  orders  and  I'll  do 
my  best." 

Hugh  read  his  father's  troubled  glance  with  a  smile.  "I'm 
not  putting  it  that  way,"  he  said.  "I  haven't  any  vote  in 
Corbett  &  Company.  I  gave  that  up  three  years  ago.  And 
I'm  not  asking  you  to  go  over  Gregory's  head,  nor  asking 
him  to  go  against  his  judgment.  I  only  put  it  up  to  him 
again,  so  that  you'll  understand  what  I'm  going  to  do.  I'm 
going  to  manufacture  that  stuff  myself." 

"Hugh,  for  heaven's  sake,  don't  fly  off  the  handle  like 
that,"  Gregory  expostulated.  "You're  not  a  manufacturer. 
You  don't  know  a  damn  thing  about  business.  You're  not  a 
salesman.  And  that  stuff  will  be  about  the  toughest  selling 
proposition  I  ever  heard  of.  It  would  take  an  ungodly  lot 
of  money  to  swing  it,  and  you're  going  to  be  comparatively 
hard  up  for  a  }Tear  or  two,  if  Corbett  &  Company  is  to  begin 
passing  dividends.  The  thing's  driven  you  half  crazy  already. 
Drop  it,  man !  For  God's  sake  drop  it,  and  go  off  with  Bob." 

"I've  been  dropping  things  all  my  life,"  Hugh  reflected, 
and  then  his  voice  sharpened  to  an  edge  which  made  their 
nerves  quiver.  "But  I'll  give  you  my  word  I'm  not  going  to 
drop  this.  I'm  going  to  see  this  thing  through.  I  don't 
know  anything  about  business,  and  efficiency,  and  costs  and  all 
the  rest  of  it,  but  I'll  learn,  and  I'll  make  it  work.  I'll  make 
myself  a  salesman;  a  missionary,  if  you  like.  I'll  make  this 
stuff,  in  the  quantities  they  need,  and  I'll  make  them  take  it, 


436  AX    AMERICAN   FAMILY 

if  it  costs  every  cent  I've  got,  or  ever  expect  to  get.  That's 
that !  So  you  don't  need  to  worry  about  me  any  more." 

In  that  lazy  lounging  way  of  his,  which  always  contrasted 
so  oddly  with  his  moments  of  intellectual  excitement,  he  got 
to  his  feet  and  pushed  his  chair  away.  "I  want  to  find  Olive/' 
he  said.  "Where  are  they  ?  Up  in  the  drawing-room  ?" 

Up  in  the  drawing-room  he  electrified  them  again.  Olive 
was  not  the  only  one  who  gasped  when  he  kissed  her  instead 
of  shaking  hands.  A  kiss  is,  of  course,  infinitely  variable 
both  in  the  degree  and  in  the  kind  of  feeling  it  can  carry.  It 
is  equally  above  disguise  and  misunderstanding;  a  singularly 
precise  language,  in  short — within  its  range.  Hugh's  kiss 
lacked,  distinctly,  the  touch  of  ceremony  which  the  occasion 
might  be  thought  to  call  for,  and  it  had  rather  more — steam 
behind  it.  Yet  it  was  curiously  impersonal,  too.  He  took 
Olive  in  his  stride,  as  it  were,  and  went  on  by. 

Then,  becoming  aware  of  the  sensation  he  had  created  he 
pulled  up  and  apologized.  "Bob  told  me  to/'  he  said.  "At 
least  he  told  me  not  to  shake  hands  with  you  and  I  took  it 
that  way." 

The  girl's  color  had  flushed  up  to  her  forehead  and  she 
literally  had  to  get  her  breath  before  she  could  speak.  She 
hadn't  supposed,  wise  young  thing  that  she  was,  that  she 
could  possibly  be  so  disconcerted  by  a  mere  unexpected  kiss. 
She  had  met  Hugh  often  enough,  of  course,  but  had  never  hap 
pened  to  get  directly  in  his  path  before.  He  had  broken  over 
her  like  a  wave. 

"Oh,  I'm  glad  you  did,"  she  said.  "I  liked  it.  Only  I  was 
surprised." 

It  occurred  to  Bob,  standing  by,  that  it  was  lucky  for  him 
that  Olive  hadn't  seen  Hugh  first.  She  was  looking  up  at 
him  now  with  a  distinctly  more  personal  interest  than  a 
newly  engaged  girl  might  reasonably  be  expected  to  feel  in 
any  man  but  one.  But  Hugh,  just  at  a  point  when  he  could 
so  pleasantly  have  started  something,  made  merely  the  little 
set  speech  he  should  have  begun  with,  excused  himself  with 
a  nod  and  a  smile,  and  went  over  to  his  mother — whom  he 
also  kissed. 


THE    WHITE    AftC  43T 

"Fm  back,"  he  told  her,  and  a  ring  that  there  was  in  his 
voice  put  into  the  two  words  all  the  reassurance  she  wanted. 

"So  I  see/'  she  said,  with  a  long  keen  look  at  him.  "Back 
just  to  go  away  again  ?" 

"I've  not  enlisted,  if  that's  what  you  mean,"  he  told  her. 
"But  it's  just  as  good." 

"I  suppose  you'll  tell  me  what  it's  all  about  when  JTOU  get 
ready,"  she  said.  "Here's  a  letter  from  Carter,  that  the  rest 
have  seen.  You'll  be  glad  to  read  it."  She  fished  it  up  out  of 
her  corsage,  and  handed  it  to  him  as  she  spoke. 

Constance,  standing  by  and  watching  him  eagerly,  was 
puzzled — for  Frank  had  given  her  a  twenty-word  summary 
of  the  talk  down-stairs.  She  saw  what  his  mother  did  not,  a 
curious,  just  momentary,  wince  go  across  his  face — a  thing 
that  looked  like  a  twinge  of  pain. 

He  carried  the  letter  off  to  one  of  the  side  lights  to  read  it. 
And  when  he  came  back  with  it  to  his  mother,  Constance 
saw  that  his  face  was  shining  with  excitement  and  pride,  and 
that  his  eyes  were  bright  with  tears.  He  didn't  put  it  back 
into  the  hand  his  mother  had  stretched  out  for  it. 

"I'd  like  to  borrow  it  for  over  to-morrow,  if  I  may,"  he  said. 
And  added,  "I  want  to  show  it  to  Jean." 

Of  course,  everybody  within  range  of  his  voice  cried  out  at 
that.  And  the  others,  having  had  it  relayed  to  them,  came 
crowding  up  with  questions. 

Jean  ?  Where  was  he  going  to  see  Jean  to-morrow  ?  Were 
they  all  coming  back  with  her  ?  When  did  he  get  his  news  ? 

"Xobody  is  coming  but  Jean  herself,"  Hugh  said.  "And 
she'll  only  be  here  for  an  hour  or  two,  I  think.  They're  going 
to  California — Mrs.  Crawford  and  Ethel.  The  raid  has  stirred 
everything  up  so  in  San  Antonio  that  Mrs.  Crawford  can't 
stand  it,  and  Gilbert's  gone  with  Pershing.  So  there's  nothing 
to  stay  for.  Jean  follows  them;  but  she  has  an  errand  to  do 
here,  first." 

"Hm!"  said  Mrs.  Corbett.    "So  that's  it,  is  it?" 

She  had  said  the  thing  which  the  others  contented  them 
selves  with  merely  thinking.  It  was  a  reconciliation  with 
Jean,  then,  that  accounted  for  the  change  in  Hugh.  That 


438  AN   AMEEICAN   FAMILY 

was  all  there  was  to  it,  after  all.  They  had  been  worrying 
themselves  into  the  grave,  here,  for  the  past  two  or  three 
weeks  orer  a  mere  lovers'  misunderstanding.  It  was  all  ex 
pressed  with  complete  adequacy  in  the  old  lady's  grunt. 

But  Constance,  still  watching  her  best  loved  brother's  face, 
was  not  so  sure,  and  when  presently  their  eyes  met,  the  look 
she  saw  in  his  confirmed  her  misgiving.  Later,  when  she  got 
a  chance,  she  led  him  away  into  the  billiard  room. 

"I  want  you  to  tell  me  a  little  more  about  Jean,"  she  said. 
"I'm  anxious  about  it.  Do  you  mind  ?" 

"Oh,  no,"  he  said,  dropping  down  on  the  cushioned  settee 
beside  her.  (It  was  between  those  two  same  cushions  that 
Jean — little  Jean  then — had  tuckod  her  precious  place-card, 
with  the  funny  toast  he  had  written  for  her  on  it,  and  for 
gotten  it  there,  and  come  back  for  it  in  the  dead  of  night, 
and  captured  her  burglar.) 

"It  isn't  what  mother  thinks/'  Hugh  said,  " — and  all  the 
rest  of  them.  I  suppose  you  guessed  that.  I  mean  it  isn't 
that  the  thing  between  us  is  'made  up'  or  going  to  be.  There 
isn't  anything  to  make  up,  of  course.  I  can  only  guess  why 
she's  coming.  All  she  said  in  her  wire  was  that  it  was  neces 
sary  that  she  see  me  for  only  an  hour,  before  she  went  to 
California.  She  asked  me  especially  not  to  meet  her  at  the 
train ;  said  she'd  come  to  the  laboratory." 

"I  don't  see,"  Constance  said,  after  she'd  thought  it  over 
for  a  while,  "how  you  know  that  she  isn't  coming  back  to — 
well,  you  needn't  call  it  making  it  up  unless  you  like;  but 
what  that  comes  to?" 

"Well,  there's  that  word  necessary.  That's  enough  all  by 
itself.  She  wouldn't  have  used  it  if  that's  what  she  meant. 
But  what  makes  me  sure  is  her  asking  me  not  to  meet  her  at 
the  station.  You  see  I  did  meet  her  there  once — the  first  time 
I  ever  saw  her.  She  couldn't  have  found  a  gentler  way  of 
telling  me,  supposing  I  needed  telling,  or  one  more  like  her. 
No,  it'a  a  case  of  conscience.  She  feels  she  ran  away  and 
that  she  has  to  come  back." 

Then,  as  Constance  reached  for  his  hand  and  lifted  it  to 


THE    WHITE    ARC  439 

her  face,  and  lie  felt  the  warmth  of  her  tears  upon  it,  he 
straightened  up  a  little  bruskly.  "Don't  you  worry  about  me," 
he  said.  "I've  been  through  that  and  come  out  on  the  other 
side/' 


CHAPTER  XXXV 

THIS  was  no  mere  brotherly  reassurance.    He  had  come 
through  his  dark  valley  of  self-questioning  and  inde 
cision,  had  struggled  out  of  the  bog  to  firm  land  again. 
It  had  been  a  nightmare  for  a  fact.     One  can  not  be  a 
Protestant  of  as  extreme  a  type  as  Hugh,  standing  alone 
before  his  God  with  no  intermediary  whatever,  without  even 
an  intervening  social  atmosphere;  one  can  not  be  his  own 
chief  justice,  the  pope  of  his  own  religion,  without  having  to 
pay,  in  moments  of  crisis,  for  the  glorious  arrogance  of  that 
position.     If  one  has  said,  consciously  or  unconsciously  to 
himself,  "I  alone  am  responsible  for  myself;  no  rule  has  any 
validity  regarding  my  conduct  except  as  I  apply  it  to  my 
self,"  he  must  forego,  in  times  of  storm,  the  shelter  of  the 
rule,  the  sense  of  righteousness  which  obedience  to  the  rule 
lends  to  the  great  majority  of  mankind. 

What  made  it  worse  for  Hugh  was  that  this  assertion  had 
always  been  unconscious.  He  was  no  casuist.  He  had  never 
devoted  any  of  the  powers  of  his  mind  or  imagination  to 
speculations  concerning  individual  morality,  until  the  dis 
covery  that  he  had  fallen  in  love  with  Jean  forced  them  upon 
him.  And  even  then,  after  a  few  brief  hours,  Corbettite 
crowded  them  out  again. 

When  Greg,  out  there  at  the  laboratory,  had  interrupted  his 
description  of  the  great  discovery  to  tell  him  that  his  wife 
had  a  lover,  he  was  in  much  the  same  position  as  that  of 
Archimedes,  whom  the  Koman  soldiers,  engaged  in  the  sack 
of  Syracuse,  found  drawing  his  diagrams  in  the  sand,  una 
ware  that  the  city  had  been  besieged.  Only,  of  course,  Hugh 
was  not  an  old  philosopher,  with  all  his  life  behind  him,  his 
great  gifts  given  to  the  world,  ready  to  die.  He  was  young ! 
Life  and  love  were  drumming  in  his  veins,  when  this  realiza- 

440 


THE    WHITE    ARC  441 

tion  of  irretrievable  disaster  was,  that  night,  brought  home  to 
him. 

There  was  no  shelter  for  him  under  the  rules,  no  comfort 
in  the  distinction  that  while  his  love  affair  with  Jean  was 
technically  innocent,  Helena's  was  guilty,  and  that  at  the 
price  of  her  guilt  his  own  innocence  had  been  purchased.  Not 
even  his  wife's  death  nor  his  own  almost  miraculously  lucky 
escape  from  the  horrifying  consequences  of  it,  changed  the 
essence  of  that  situation  by  one  iota.  There  was  no  clear 
course  that  he  could  steer. 

It  was  Gregory  again  who  brought  that  home  to  him,  when 
he  cried  out,  over  Helena's  body  there,  "Good  God,  Hugh,  isn't 
there  anybody  but  yourself  in  the  world?"  The  conviction 
that  there  never  had  been  anybody  but  himself  in  the  world, 
so  far  as  his  own  calculations  and  decisions  went — that  in 
tolerable  conviction  was  the  one  that  was  rammed  home  to 
him  during  the  succeeding  days. 

The  task,  whose  moral  necessity  he  had  foreseen,  when 
kneeling,  he  had  looked  down  into  his  wife's  beautiful  dead 
face,  a  review  of  his  life,  the  appraisal  of  it,  the  discovery  of 
the  secret  of  its  failure,  was  one  that  he  had  settled  to  with 
dread,  and  continued  to  pursue  only  by  dint  of  keeping  his 
resolution  screwed  up  to  the  highest  pitch.  He  went  back  as 
far  into  his  boyhood  as  he  could  remember,  and  tried  to  re 
build  the  whole  thing,  to  reassemble  the  picture  under  hia 
eyes. 

The  picture  his  mood  had  conjured  up  was,  of  course,  a 
caricature,  an  absolute  monster  of  egotism.  He  had  momenta 
of  realizing  that  this  was  true,  and  he  made  an  effort,  at  last, 
to  dismiss  the  monster,  whicfrlike  Frankenstein,  he  had  cre 
ated,  to  dissolve  him  back  into  his  elements.  He  had  some 
thing  more  important  to  think  about — Corbettite. 

His  talk  with  Gregory  about  it,  the  one  Mrs.  Corbett  after 
ward  reported  to  Constance,  staggered  him.  Hugh  was  not 
the  typical  inventor,  the  sort  of  wild-eyed  visionary  who  wan 
ders  about  with  his  head  in  the  clouds,  disdainful  of  his  feet, 
and  just  for  that  reason  Gregory's  arguments  went  home 
with  a  terrible  cogency.  The  distinction  he  made  between  the 


AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

scientific  discovery — a  laboratory  affair — and  a  marketable 
commodity,  was  one  that  Hugh  himself,  in  more  normal 
circumstances,  would  not  have  needed  to  have  pointed  out  to 
him.  But  the  circumstances  were  not  normal. 

Mrs.  Corbett  might  say  what  she  liked  about  work  never 
hurting  a  Corbett ;  but  no  man  could  have  gone  through  what 
Hugh  had  gone  through  during  that  last  week  in  the  labora 
tory  without  an  immense  exhaustion  of  spirit,  a  weakening  of 
all  his  vital  reserves.  He  was  in  that  state  when  the  crash 
came — Helena's  murder,  Jean's  flight. 

Constance  had  come  pretty  close  home  here  with  the  re 
mark  she  made  to  her  mother  that  it  must  be  positively 
ghastly  to  have  people  sympathizing  with  you  over  something 
you  felt  like  a  criminal  for  being  glad  about.  He  didn't  feel 
glad  over  Helena's  death  to  be  sure;  but  it  was  true,  just 
as  it  had  been  in  his  former  great  emotional  crisis  with  her, 
that  the  excruciating  thing  was  the  failure  of  his  emotions  to 
run  true  to  form.  He  didn't  feel  the  thing  which  logically 
he  might  have  been  expected  to  feel.  Helena's  death,  which 
ought  to  have  made  everything  right,  somehow  made  every 
thing  wrong  between  him  and  Jean. 

The  imaginative  bond  which  united  these  two  was  so  close, 
so  insufferably  tight,  that  he  felt  the  shock  of  the  tragedy 
with  her  nerves  as  well  as  with  his  own  and  knew  besides  that 
she  felt  it  with  his.  He  hadn't  needed  Constance's  vivid 
report  to  enable  him  to  experience  Jean's  sick  revulsion. 
The  trouble  between  them  was  not  a  misunderstanding;  but 
the  opposite  of  that.  There  was  nothing,  then,  for  messages, 
letters,  even  a  personal  encounter  to  clear  away.  There  was 
nothing  to  be  said,  nothing  to  be  explained.  The  one  real 
solvent  to  the  situation,  for  there  was  one  of  course,  neither 
of  them  thought  of. 

It  was  in  this  spiritual  state  that  after  his  talk  with  Gregory 
he  flogged  himself  back  to  the  consideration  of  Corbettite,  and 
what  he  was  going  to  do  about  it.  All  his  vision,  his  faith 
in  the  great  discovery,  even  his  consciousness  of  the  desperate 
need  of  it,  was  gone,  except  as  a  matter  of  memory.  He  had 
believed  in  it  once.  He  had  seen  the  need  of  it  once,  and 


THE    WHITE    AEG  443 

clinging  to  that  memory  he  went  to  work  at  it  again,  trying 
to  project  it  upon  the  new  scale  that  Gregory  had  shown  him 
the  necessity  of  working  upon.  He  spent  his  days  over  his 
work-table,  completely  incredulous  of  the  possibility  of  ulti 
mate  success.  He  spent  his  nights,  long  hours  of  them  when 
he  could  not  sleep,  trying  to  flee  from  that  Frankenstein 
monster  of  himself,  which  he  had  created.  I  don't  wonder 
that  Mrs.  Corbett,  from  the  glimpse  she  got  of  him  during 
those  days,  spoke  of  him  as  hagridden. 

Most  men,  most  imaginative  men  at  any  rate,  climb,  some 
time  in  their  lives,  to  a  Gethsemane.  Hugh's  came  one  night, 
a  little  after  Villa's  raid,  when  the  prospect  of  our  going  to 
war  with  Mexico  became  a  clearly  visible  thing. 

It  offered  him  a  way  of  escape  from  Corbettite.  It  offered, 
as  an  alternative  to  his  tormented  gropings,  a  single  clear 
thing  to  do.  One  of  these  beautiful  straight  things  that 
would  not  tangle  itself  up.  For  the  mere  writing  down  of 
his  name  upon  an  enlistment  roll,  the  mere  taking  of  an 
oath  of  obedience,  he  could  get  shelter  under  the  rules,  could 
enjoy  the  heavenly  relief  of  taking  orders  from  somebody  not 
himself ;  he  could  work  at  something  clearly  serviceable.  Work, 
at  first  perhaps,  with  his  hands.  And  at  the  same  time,  he 
could  be  doing  a  thing  that  Jean  would  understand  and,  he 
believed,  in  her  heart  approve.  This  was  the  temptation  he 
faced,  agonized  over,  and  finally  conquered.  What  had  en 
abled  him  to  conquer  it  had  been  the  realization  that  to  turn 
away  from  Corbettite  now  and  enlist  in  the  army  would  be 
merely  a  repetition,  another  of  those  withdrawals  responsible 
for  the  failure  he  had  made  so  far  of  his  life. 

He  had  made  an  ignominious  failure  of  it,  a  ludicrous 
failure — ore  that  God,  anyhow,  might  laugh  at — pride  going 
along  before  destruction,  a  spirit  at  its  haughtiest,  always,  just 
before  a  fall.  And  what  had  he  done  when  he  fell  in  the  bog  ? 
Got  up  and  struggled  on  through  ?  No,  he  had  not  once  clone 
that.  He  had  contented  himself  with  the  fatuous  assertion 
that  the  road  should  have  been  there,  anyhow.  When  he  had 
failed  to  persuade  his  father  to  adopt  his  method  of  solving 
their  labor  troubles  he  had  resigned — with  a  gesture ! — from 


444  AN"    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

Corbett  &  Company,  and  gone  outside  the  fence.  When  the 
strikers  had  refused  to  follow  his  advice,  and  howled  him 
down  in  the  hall  he  had  hired  out  at  Biverdale,  he  had 
shrugged  and  acquiesced.  Let  them  stew  in  their  own  juice ! 
When  Gregory  had  hurt  his  feelings  by  betraying  a  fear  lest 
.his  share  in  authority  under  his  grandfather's  trust  might 
prove  embarrassing,  he  had,  in  all  but  legal  formality,  with 
drawn  from  the  trust.  When  his  marriage  had  shown  itself 
not  to  be  the  perfect  alloy  of  his  dreams,  he  had  abandoned  it 
to  chance.  "Anything  for  a  quiet  life !"  was  about  what  his 
compromise  with  Helena  came  to.  Even  his  country  he  had, 
in  effect,  abandoned,  when  it  failed  to  react  in  a  way  he  con 
sidered  appropriate  to  the  tragedy  of  the  European  war.  The 
America  of  the  school  books,  he  had  told  Jean,  did  not  exist ! 

Now,  here  was  Corbettite,  a  real  thing,  a  necessary  thing, 
all  it  should  be,  except  a  practicable  thing;  and,  confronted 
by  the  difficulties  of  making  it  practical — real  difficulties  to 
be  sure,  and  to  Gregory's  eyes  insuperable — he  contemplated 
withdrawing  again.  He  was  right,  as  he  had  been  right  be 
fore.  But  Gregory  wouldn't  believe  it.  The  world  wouldn't 
believe  it.  Well  then,  let  it  go. 

No,  by  God!  By  his  own  God,  with  whom  he  had  been 
^wrestling  lately  as  Jacob  of  old  had  wrestled,  he  wouldn't  let 
it  go.  That  door  was  shut.  That  way  of  escape  cut  off.  If 
it  took  his  fortune,  his  life,  his  happiness,  even  his  reason,  he 
would  fight  it  out  on  that  line.  With  this  decision,  he  wiped 
the  sweat  off  his  forehead  and  straightened  his  back,  and  there 
upon,  like  a  miracle,  the  pack  he  had  been  staggering  under 
dropped  from  his  shoulders.  He  was  his  own  man  again. 

The  prime  difficulty  about  making  Corbettite  in  quantities 
-was  the  immense  amount  of  electric  current  that  the  process 
needed.  He  would  have  to  go  where  he  could  get  it  in  unlim 
ited  quantities,  and  cheap.  He  thought  first  of  Niagara 
Falls,  then  remembered  the  great  Mississippi  dam,  not  five 
hours  away,  and  nearer  the  lead  supply.  He  packed  his  bag 
and  took  a  train,  and  spent  a  week  among  the  small  factory 
towns  the  dam  supplied  with  power,  looking  for  a  factory  that 
could  serve  his  purpose.  It  was  from  this  journey  that  he 


THE    WHITE    AEG  445 

returned  to  find  the  news  of  Bob's  engagement,  the  invitation, 
to  the  family  dinner,  and  Jean's  telegram. 

It  had  been  all  very  well  to  tell  Constance  that  Jean's 
return  didn't  mean  what  their  mother  and  the  rest  supposed 
it  did.  The  reasons  that  he  gave  her,  for  his  convictions  on 
this  point,  were  what  he  had  honestly  worked  out  and  ac 
cepted  for  himself.  And  the  serenity  with  which  he  had  told 
Constance  not  to  worry  about  him  had  been  a  genuine  thing, 
too,  to  the  extent  at  least  of  not  being  a  conscious  pose.  Never 
theless,  when  he  got  back  to  his  laboratory — he  meant  to  spend 
the  night  there  rather  than  at  his  house — it  was  natural  that 
he  should  put  off  going  to  bed  and  trying  to  get  to  sleep  as 
long  as  possible.  He  was  not  yet  sleeping  more  than  half 
as  much  or  quarter  as  well  as  he  ought  to,  and  he  had  not 
altogether  got  rid  of  his  nightmare.  Unless  he  succeeded  in 
working  himself  to  the  point  of  exhaustion  first,  that  telegram 
had  distressing  possibilities  for  him — dreams,  impossible 
dreams,  unreasonable  hopes,  panicky  fears  over  that  interview 
that  was  going  to  take  place  sometime  to-morrow  between 
them.  He  simply  must  not  get  started  thinking  about  it, 
that  was  all !  If  he  did  he  was  lost. 

So  when  he  had  got  into  pajamas  and  dressing-gown  and 
loaded  a  pipe,  he  went  to  work,  with  a  leather-bound  Kent  at 
his  elbow,  figuring  out  necessary  alterations  in  the  building 
he  had  in  mind,  weights  and  supports  for  line  shafts  and 
machinery,  an  infinitely  laborious  sort  of  occupation  for  him, 
and  one  that  under  other  circumstances  he  would  have  turned 
over  to  some  one  else.  But  the  old  grandiose  days,  when  cost 
was  the  one  consideration  that  never  entered  his  head,  were 
gone.  He  was  cheese  paring  now,  for  he  foresaw,  plainly- 
enough,  that  for  the  next  twelve  months,  at  least,  he  would 
need  every  cent  he  could  lay  his  hands  on. 

But  even  this  occupation,  with  all  the  power  of  self -disci 
pline  he  could  apply  to  the  enforcement  of  it,  did  not  avail  to 
keep  Jean  out  of  his  thoughts.  Her  telegram,  which  lay  there 
on  the  desk,  kept  attracting  his  eye,  and  interrupted  his  cal 
culations.  He  put  it  away  in  a  drawer,  but  merely  with  the 
result  that  the  drawer  handle  charged  itself  with  the  same  sort 


446  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

of  electricity.  His  hand  strayed  to  it  as  his  eye  had  strayed 
to  the  typewritten  yellow  sheet.  At  last  he  took  it  out  again 
and  crushed  it  up  into  a  ball,  and  gripped  it  tight  against 
the  palm  of  his  left  hand. 

Hour  after  hour  he  worked  doggedly  on  in  the  paradoxical 
determination  not  to  stop  until  he  had  stopped  thinking  about 
her.  But  what  he  did  at  last,  with  a  little  sound  that  was 
half  groan,  half  laugh,  was  to  push  away  his  blue  prints  and 
his  sheets  of  figures  and  press  that  limp  ball  of  paper  against 
his  lips,  bury  his  face  in  his  hands,  and  let  go ;  open  the  door 
and  let  the  image  of  the  girl  come  as  she  would  into  his 
thoughts.  Strangely,  instead  of  tormenting,  her  imagined 
presence  quieted  him,  brought  him  comfort,  relaxation.  His 
elbows  were  on  the  desk.  His  head  weighed  heavier  upon  his 
supporting  hands — and  he  fell  asleep. 

When  he  awakened,  the  gray  light  of  a  cloudy  April  morn 
ing  was  in  the  room.  His  watch,  which  lay  on  the  desk 
before  him,  showed  seven  o'clock;  but  he  felt  as  if  he  had 
slept  a  long  time.  A  deeper  slumber,  it  must  have  been  than 
any  he  had  had  in  long  weeks.  His  arms  and  legs  were  blood 
less  and  so  stiff  with  cold  and  inaction  that  he  could  hardly 
command  their  movements. 

He  got  up  creakily  and  went  into  his  little  sleeping  apart 
ment  to  get  himself  ready  to  face  the  day — the  day  which 
was  to  contain,  somewhere,  that  unforeseeable  hour  with 
Jean.  He  dreaded  it  now.  Wished  it  would  come  soon.  The 
hours  he  would  have  to  wait  for  it  seemed  intolerable. 

He  had  thought  he  was  alone  in  the  building,  and  was  a 
little  surprised  to  hear  his  man  moving  about  down-stairs. 
He  hadn't  supposed  he  came  as  early  as  this.  Just  when  he 
was  half  shaved,  he  heard  another  step  coming  up  the  stairs — 
not  the  step  of  Jean's  faithful  burglar,  a  step  incredibly  like 
her  own. 

And  then,  still  more  amazingly,  a  voice — hers  beyond  the 
possibility  of  a  doubt — calling  his  name.  But  the  really 
amazing  thing,  the  revolutionary  thing,  was  the  fact  it  pro 
claimed.  Not  merely  that  she  was  there — that  was  surprising 
enough,  of  course,  at  this  hour  in  the  morning — but  that  she 


THE    WHITE    ARC  447 

was  Jean,  his  Jean,  the  Jean  of  his  memories,  the  Jean  he  had 
been  wont  to  ride  with  mornings ;  who  put  clean  out  of  exist 
ence,  in  just  that  one  syllable,  the  horrified,  panic-struck,  re 
volted  Jean  whom  Constance  had  told  him  about. 

His  heart  missed  a  beat.  Then,  literally  leaped.  And  he 
heard  his  own  voice  saying,  "I'm  in  here;  but  I'm  only  half 
shaved.  How  in  the  world  did  you  come  so  early  ?" 

"It  can't  be  so  very  early,"  he  heard  her  say.  "It  must  b« 
ten  o'clock." 

"Ten  o'clock!"  he  exclaimed.  "It  was  seven  only  about  a 
quarter  of  an  hour  ago." 

"Your  watch  says  seven,"  she  informed  him,  '^but  ifg 
stopped.  Shall  I  wind  it  up  and  set  it  for  you?" 

Good  lord,  what  a  sleep  he'd  had ! 

"Yes,  I  wish  you  would,  if  yours  is  right,"  he  said.  "I'll 
be  out  in  five  minutes." 

"Was  it  that  chair  you  went  to  sleep  in  ?"  she  asked.  "Over 
those  blue  prints  ?" 

He  admitted  it  was.  "Try  it  yourself,"- he  suggested.  "It 
must  be  more  comfortable  than  I  supposed." 

He  told  himself,  as  he  wiped  his  razor  and  put  it  away, 
that  this  must  be  a  dream.  It  couldn't  be  possible  that  it 
was  real,  or  founded  on  reality,  that  sense  he  had  got,  just 
from  the  sound  of  her  voice  and  the  knowledge  that  she  was 
there  in  the  next  room,  that  everything  had  suddenly  come 
right  once  more;  that  unfathomable  feeling  of  security.  The 
approaching  interview,  as  he  had  foreseen  it  yesterday,  was 
fraught  with  infinite  possibilities  of  pain  for  both  of  them. 
Xothing  had  happened  since  then.  Nothing  was  changed. 
This  must  be  a  dream.  And  yet  it  seemed  like  an  awakening 
from  one,  from  a  nightmare.  Then  his  nerves  grew  taut 
again. 

"Jean,"  he  said,  "there's  a  letter  there  on  the  desk — just 
about  under  your  left  hand  it  will  be — that  I  want  you  to 
read.  It's  from  Carter  to  his  mother.  I  borrowed,  it  for  you 
last  night." 

"Yes,"  she  answered,  and  her  voice,  too,  changed  its  quality 
as  she  spoke.  "Here  it  is." 


448  AN    AMERICAN    FAMILY 

There  was  a  silence  after  that  until,  fully  dressed,  he  came 
out  into  the  library.  He  had  come  softly,  and  she  did  not 
hear  him  until  he  was  fairly  in  the  room.  The  letter  she  was 
still  reading  lay  upon  the  topmost  of  the  blue  prints,  and  the 
crumpled  handkerchief  in  her  hand  was  being  used  intermit 
tently  to  cope  with  tears. 

When  she  saw  him  she  would  have  risen.  But  he  said,  "No, 
finish  it.  I  meant  to  have  given  you  time."  Obediently,  she 
turned  back  to  the  letter. 

He  came  around  the  desk,  half  seated  himself  on  the  end 
of  it  and  watched.  For  a  long  time  after  she  must  have 
finished,  she  sat  there  gazing  through  a  blur  of  now  disre 
garded  tears  at  the  last  page  of  the  letter.  He,  with  one 
knee  pulled  up,  clenched  in  the  vise-like  grip  of  his  two 
great  hands,  looked  out  the  window  over  the  roofs.  He  felt, 
presently,  that  she  had  looked  up  from  her  letter  to  his  face, 
but  it  was  a  matter  of  interminable  seconds  before,  looking 
down,  he  met  her  gaze. 

"Oh,  I  know,"  she  said.   "But     .     .     » 

There  are  no  words  for  the  language  of  looks.  In  Jean's 
face  there  was  a  sort  of  smile;  a  tenderness,  compounded  of 
pity,  and  love,  and  admiration  for  the  boy  over  there  in  France. 
But  all  that  was  a  mere  riffle  across  the  surface  of  it.  For 
the  deeper  thing  that  spoke  in  it,  was  a  reaffirmation  of  what 
it  had  said  before — the  last  time  their  eyes  had  met.  Weeks 
ago.  There  on  the  frozen  beach  at  Lake  Forest. 

His  whole  body  went  rigid  with  tension  that  increased  to 
an  agony,  then  relaxed. 

She  drooped  her  head  at  last,  and  pressed  her  trembling 
hands  to  her  face. 

"Oh,  my  dear,"  he  whispered,  and  gathered  her  up  into  his 
arms. 

She  managed  to  say,  between  gasps,  "Wasn't  it  perfectly — 
ridiculous — our  thinking  anything  could  make  a  difference — 
to  this." 

This  is,  of  course,  no  more  the  end  of  Hugh  Corbett's  history 
than  the  festivities  connected  with  the  wedding  of  his  sister 


THE    WHITE    ARC  449 

Anne  were  the  beginning  of  it.  The  capture  of  Jean's  bur 
glar  in  the  midst  of  those  festivities  seemed,  to  his  biographer, 
to  offer  a  good  opportunity  for  picking  up  the  thread.  The 
event  of  this  April  day,  nearly  five  years  later,  is  an  oppor 
tunity  for  laying  it  down. 

Not  so  much  because  it  is  an  end  of  something,  as  because 
it  is  a  fresh  beginning;  the  beginning  of  something  not  yet — 
as  I  write — ended,  nor  even  far  enough  away  to  be  seen  in  its 
true  perspective. 

That  determination  of  his  not  to  give  up  Corbettite  be 
cause  the  practical  world,  typified  by  Gregory,  the  world  that 
so  immensely  needed  it,  would  not,  in  its  ignorance,  believe  in 
it;  his  decision,  under  the  agonizing  temptation  to  do  some 
thing  else,  to  force  that  belief  upon  the  world,  his  acceptance 
of  a  moral  responsibility  for  the  enforcement,  marks  another, 
and  perhaps  the  most  important,  of  his  critical  angles. 

It  was  a  change  that  could  not,  at  his  age,  have  been 
wrought  in  him  under  less  fierce  a  heat  than  that  generated  in 
the  white  arc  of  passion  and  of  tragedy  those  recent  days  had 
brought  home  to  him.  It  had  transmuted  the  metal  of  his 
soul  as  the  arc  in  his  laboratory  transmuted  lead  into  Cor 
bettite. 

I  believe  it  really  to  be  true,  that  the  Hugh  who  emerged 
from  that  fiery  furnace  of  pain  and  humiliation  had  been 
born  again;  that  he  had  a  new  fiber;  an  accessibility  to  fresh 
conceptions.  The  chief  of  those  conceptions,  of  course,  was 
of  the  necessity,  at  last,  of  giving  up,  as  a  prime  considera 
tion,  the  maintenance  of  his  intellectual  integrity;  of  sub 
mitting  himself  to  be  digested  into  a  bigger  thing  than  himself. 
If  that  be  religion,  and  Pm  inclined  to  think  it  is,  then  Hugh 
had  found  it. 

Neither  he  nor  Jean  called  it  by  that  name,  but  it  was 
clear  that  they  felt  it  that  way. 

There  was  a  touch  of  gravity  about  their  behavior  that  day 
which  Mrs.  Corbett  characterized,  broadly,  as  some  more  of 
Hugh's  damned  nonsense.  Constance  cried  out  at  that,  but 
Jean  only  smiled. 

This  was  around  six  o'clock  at  the  big  house.     Hugh  was 


450  AN   AMERICAN    FAMILY 

coming,  when  he  had  finished  some  work,  for  dinner.  Con 
stance  had  brought  Jean,  after  a  preliminary  examination,  to 
tell  the  news  to  her  mother.  Mrs.  Corbett,  feeling  a  good 
deal  more  emotional  and  relieved  about  it  than  she  was  willing 
to  appear — than  she  could  consistently  appear,  since  she  had 
said  straight  along  that  the  difficulty  about  Jean  amounted 
to  nothing — was  exhibiting  a  sort  of  ferocious  good  humor. 
She  wanted  to  know  why  Jean  was  in  such  a  hurry  to  go  to 
California ;  what  was  to  prevent  her  from  making  them  a  little 
visit,  now  she  was  here. 

Jean  admitted  there  was  nothing,  so  far  as  her  own  affairs 
were  concerned.  "But  Hugh's  going  to  be  so  busy  getting  his 
factory  started — every  hour  just  now  will  mean  a  day,  later, 
he  says.  And  I  know  Fd  be  in  his  way." 

"Of  all  cold-blooded  .  .  . !"  Mrs.  Corbett  exclaimed. 
"And  even  to-day,  instead  of  taking  you  off  holidaying,  he 
listens  to  you  just  long  enough  to  make  sure  that  you  really 
mean  to  marry  him,  and  then  tells  you  to  run  along  and  talk 
to  the  women !" 

"I  was  hours  at  the  laboratory,"  Jean  protested.  "I  had 
lunch  with  him  there.  And  he's  called  me  up  on  the  telephone 
twice  since !" 

"And  he  might  as  well  have  come  along  with  you  for  all 
he'll  have  done  since  you  left;  instead  of  sitting  there  pre 
tending  he's  a  business  man.  A  nice  job  he'll  make  of  that !" 

"He'll  succeed  at  it/'  said  Jean,  rather  crisply.  "Hell 
succeed — wonderfully." 

Mrs.  Corbett  grinned.  "Of  course  he  will,  you  little  spit 
fire,"  she  said.  "Do  you  think  you  can  tell  his  old  mother 
anything  about  him?" 

She  went  on  to  say,  after  a  ruminative  silence,  "If  he's 
really  turned  the  corner — and  you  and  I  believe  he  has — hell 
be  turning  up  at  Eiverdale,  the  first  thing  Greg  knows,  and 
giving  him  the  surprise  of  his  life.  And  he  won't  do  it  by 
hiring  a  hall,  either !" 

That  startled  Jean  a  little.  She  thought  herself  the  only 
person  in  the  world  who  had  divined  that  intention  of  her 


THE    WHITE    ARC  451 

lover's — to  go  back  to  that  old  battle-field  and  win  a  victory. 
There  was  both  wonder  and  affection  in  the  look  she  stole  at 
Hugh's  mother.  But  the  older  woman  only  grinned  back. 

"I  don't  know  why  the  notion  of  Greg  getting  a  surprise 
always  pleases  me  so  much,  but  it  does.  Perhaps  because  I 
think  surprises  are  good  for  him." 

Hugh  turned  up  on  time  for  dinner,  with  his  father  and 
mother,  Constance  and  Jean.  Mrs.  Corbett  had  horrified 
Constance  with  the  suggestion  that  they  make  it  a  party  for 
the  open  announcement — to  the  family — of  the  engagement. 
This  was  probably  not  serious  on  her  part,  but  she  did  insist, 
with  outrageous  gusto,  in  refusing  to  speak  of  it  with  bated 
breath  and  decent  euphemism. 

For  the  five  who  sat  down  about  the  board,  it  made  an 
hour  that  each  of  them  remembers  with  a  quite  peculiar  satis 
faction,  not  from  anything  that  was  especially  talked  about, 
but  from  a  sense  of  restoration  and  peace  that  there  was  about 
it.  And  then,  a  little  after  nine  Hugh  took  Jean  down  to 
the  station  to  see  her  off  for  California. 

They  had  started  a  little  earlier  than  necessary,  and  they 
stood  for  a  while  out  in  the  concourse — under  the  bulletin 
board — waiting  for  the  train  to  be  announced. 

"If  you  weren't  so — ruthless,"  Hugh  told  her  with  a  smile, 
"and  had  waited  three  days  or  such  a  matter,  I  could  have 
gone  part  of  the  way  with  you.  Across  Illinois.  Because  by 
then  I'll  be  ready  to  make  another  trip  back  to  the  factory." 

"I'll  wait  if  you  want  me  to,"  she  said.  "I'll — do  anything 
you  want  me  to.  Anything  in  the  world." 

"I  don't  quite  know  why  I  don't,"  he  reflected.  "I  suppose 
it's  because  I'm  still  walking  softly  for  fear  of  waking  myself 
up.  Not  wanting  to  press  my  good  fortune  too  far.  Like 
asking  one  favor  too  many  of  a  fairy  godmother.  And  after 
all,  you  won't  really  go  away,  wherever  you  are." 

"It's  wonderful — how  well  we  can  get  on — without  each 
other,"  she  assented.  "There's  the  train.  They'll  let  you 
through  the  gate,  won't  they?" 

They  had  the  better  part  of  half  an  hour  there  in  her  sec- 


452  AN    AMEKICAN    FAMILY 

tion  of  the  Pullman,  before  it  was  time  for  him  to  go,  but  all 
the  time  they  talked  only  a  little,  mere  punctuation  of  the 
silences,  which  after  all  told  more. 

The  future  they  contemplated  would  have  looked  uncertain 
enough  to  most  lovers.  It  had  never  been  said  between  them, 
that  Corbettite  was  to  be  made  a  serviceable  thing  before  they 
married,  but  this  understanding  was  implicit  in  all  their  ref 
erences  to  it.  And  after  Corbettite,  in  the  minds  of  both  of 
them,  for  Hugh  there  was — France;  for  Jean,  too,  perhaps. 
It  was  not  possible  to  plan,  of  course,  nor  even  vaguely  to 
foresee. 

When  at  last  Hugh  bent  over  her  for  a  farewell  caress,  there 
was  no  attempt  to  fix  the  day  when  they  should  see  each  other 
again.  Both  had  tears  and  tight  throats,  but  there  was  a 
wonderful  serenity  in  their  hearts. 

"We  don't  know  much  about  anything,"  Jean  said  un 
evenly.  "But  this  is  safe.  Nothing  can  possibly  happen  to 
it — to  you  and  me/' 

There  was  no  rhetoric  about  that.  In  a  world  of  chaos  that, 
underneath,  was  the  everlasting  arms. 


THE  END 


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